“When you go there you will see lots of diseases.  If there is a hot summer, and plenty of barges passing, something is sure to break out—­typhus, or black small-pox, or Siberian plague, or something of the kind.  That Siberian plague is a curious thing.  Whether it really comes from Siberia, God only knows.  So soon as it breaks out the horses die by dozens, and sometimes men and women are attacked, though it is not properly a human disease.  They say that flies carry the poison from the dead horses to the people.  The sign of it is a thing like a boil, with a dark-coloured rim.  If this is cut open in time the person may recover, but if it is not, the person dies.  There is cholera, too, sometimes.”

“What a delightful country,” I said to myself, “for a young doctor who wishes to make discoveries in the science of disease!”

The catalogue of diseases inhabiting this favoured region was apparently not yet complete, but it was cut short for the moment by the arrival of the assistant, with the announcement that his superior was wanted.

This first interview with the feldsher was, on the whole, satisfactory.  He had not rendered me any medical assistance, but he had helped me to pass an hour pleasantly, and had given me a little information of the kind I desired.  My later interviews with him were equally agreeable.  He was naturally an intelligent, observant man, who had seen a great deal of the Russian world, and could describe graphically what he had seen.  Unfortunately the horizontal position to which I was condemned prevented me from noting down at the time the interesting things which he related to me.  His visits, together with those of Karl Karl’itch and of the priest, who kindly spent a great part of his time with me, helped me to while away many an hour which would otherwise have been dreary enough.

During the intervals when I was alone I devoted myself to reading—­sometimes Russian history and sometimes works of fiction.  The history was that of Karamzin, who may fairly be called the Russian Livy.  It interested me much by the facts which it contained, but irritated me not a little by the rhetorical style in which it is written.  Afterwards, when I had waded through some twenty volumes of the gigantic work of Solovyoff—­or Solovief, as the name is sometimes unphonetically written—­which is simply a vast collection of valuable but undigested material, I was much less severe on the picturesque descriptions and ornate style of his illustrious predecessor.  The first work of fiction which I read was a collection of tales by Grigorovitch, which had been given to me by the author on my departure from St. Petersburg.  These tales, descriptive of rural life in Russia, had been written, as the author afterwards admitted to me, under the influence of Dickens.  Many of the little tricks and affectations which became painfully obtrusive in Dickens’s later works I had no difficulty in recognising under their Russian garb.  In spite of these I found the book very pleasant reading, and received from it some new notions—­to be afterwards verified, of course—­about Russian peasant life.