Armed with this document you go to the post-station and demand the requisite number of horses.  Three is the number generally used, but if you travel lightly and are indifferent to appearances, you may content yourself with a pair.  The vehicle is a kind of tarantass, but not such as I have just described.  The essentials in both are the same, but those which the Imperial Government provides resemble an enormous cradle on wheels rather than a phaeton.  An armful of hay spread over the bottom of the wooden box is supposed to play the part of seats and cushions.  You are expected to sit under the arched covering, and extend your legs so that the feet lie beneath the driver’s seat; but it is advisable, unless the rain happens to be coming down in torrents, to get this covering unshipped, and travel without it.  When used, it painfully curtails the little freedom of movement that you enjoy, and when you are shot upwards by some obstruction on the road it is apt to arrest your ascent by giving you a violent blow on the top of the head.

It is to be hoped that you are in no hurry to start, otherwise your patience may be sorely tried.  The horses, when at last produced, may seem to you the most miserable screws that it was ever your misfortune to behold; but you had better refrain from expressing your feelings, for if you use violent, uncomplimentary language, it may turn out that you have been guilty of gross calumny.  I have seen many a team composed of animals which a third-class London costermonger would have spurned, and in which it was barely possible to recognise the equine form, do their duty in highly creditable style, and go along at the rate of ten or twelve miles an hour, under no stronger incentive then the voice of the yamstchik.  Indeed, the capabilities of these lean, slouching, ungainly quadrupeds are often astounding when they are under the guidance of a man who knows how to drive them.  Though such a man commonly carries a little harmless whip, he rarely uses it except by waving it horizontally in the air.  His incitements are all oral.  He talks to his cattle as he would to animals of his own species—­now encouraging them by tender, caressing epithets, and now launching at them expressions of indignant scorn.  At one moment they are his “little doves,” and at the next they have been transformed into “cursed hounds.”  How far they understand and appreciate this curious mixture of endearing cajolery and contemptuous abuse it is difficult to say, but there is no doubt that it somehow has upon them a strange and powerful influence.

Any one who undertakes a journey of this kind should possess a well-knit, muscular frame and good tough sinews, capable of supporting an unlimited amount of jolting and shaking; at the same time he should be well inured to all the hardships and discomforts incidental to what is vaguely termed “roughing it.”  When he wishes to sleep in a post-station, he will find nothing softer than a wooden bench, unless