We have travelled, says John Yeardley, four days and nights in succession from Moscow to this place.  The conveyances of the country are exceedingly bad; they almost shook our bones asunder.

The next day they visited Pastor Landesen, to whom they had a letter of introduction from Pastor Dietrich.  They spent the day with the family of this intelligent and pious man.  Tea was spread in the garden, to which meal a number of Christian friends were invited.

The pastor’s wife, says John Yeardley, is a sweet-spirited woman.  After much social converse our garden-visit closed with a religious occasion, in which I expressed a few words of exhortation.  I think we were sensible of the nearness of the presence of our Divine Master, which proved a brook by the dreary way.  We met at the pastor’s Louse Superintendent Huber, a worthy and experienced Christian, kind and fatherly to us.

The next day William Rasche went with Pastor Landesen to hire a carriage.  No such thing, however, was to be had, and they would have been happy if they could have engaged as good a vehicle as their old crazy tarantas; for the only alternative was a bauer-wagen (peasant’s cart), if we except the very expensive extra-post carriage, with which they would have been obliged to take a conductor.  It happened that a young man, an apothecary’s assistant, wanted to go to Iekaterinoslav; his ancestors were German, and he could speak both that language and Russ.  By Landesen’s recommendation they took him as their companion, and he was very useful to them on the road.  The bauer-wagen was much more uncomfortable than the tarantas had been; travelling in it was like gallopping over a bad road in an English farmer’s waggon; and, as the vehicle had no cover, the travellers were exposed without protection to the full power of the sun.  The floor of the waggon was spread with mattresses, and, thus furnished, it served them for parlor, kitchen, and lodging-room.

They travelled in this way through the night, but the next day were obliged to wait at a small dirty station for horses till the afternoon; and in the evening John Yeardley became so ill, from hard travelling and exposure to the heat, that they were compelled to alight at another little station near Novomoskovsk, and make the best of the poor accommodation they could procure.  The next morning, somewhat refreshed by rest, they went forwards to Iekaterinoslav, where they happily met with a clean inn, the Hotel Suisse, kept by a German.

The same day they went in a boat up the river Samava, to Rybalsk, seven miles, to see a German schoolmaster named Schreitel, to whom they had a letter of introduction.  This is a colony of twenty-five families, founded in 1788:  the schoolmaster, who was also the minister, received them in a brotherly manner.  It was here that their mission properly commenced.  From this place a succession of German colonies extend in a south-easterly