The doors were heavily barred; when at length they yielded, after many grumblings, a wizened figure in official uniform stepped forth. It was the postmaster--it seemed the embodiment of some immense and ideal sorrow of which all human griefs are but the mirrored images. How cross the threshold upon which he stood, how enlist his sympathy with our puny wants, who himself was the incarnation of Want? But the keenness of the air overcame our hesitation; a night in tents and without blankets was the alternative course. So with a greeting, which was coldly returned, we led the way to the interior, followed by our dismal host. It appeared to consist of a single room, a spacious apartment with bare floor and white-washed walls. A few chairs and a large table were the only furniture; the only ornaments the usual coloured oleograph of the reigning emperor, and, perhaps, the almanac and the posting map, which were suspended on the walls. Yet the postmaster was not the only occupant of the building; children appeared, and with them a young and beautiful girl. A Polish maiden? one could not doubt of the answer, as one admired the slender form, the swelling bust, the full lips and the pale face with its animated eyes. Ah! the pitiful story eloquently told by this unambiguous presence--the mother already a victim to the prolonged atrophy of these cheerless surroundings, the father a sapless tree in an alien soil. Who sent them to such cold solitudes, these warm natures and passionate temperaments? Find a wilderness and it will be tenanted by a Pole.... The practical question arose: how accommodate ourselves and the family within the four white walls? The father protested that it was completely impossible; the girl came to our assistance, and revealed the existence of an adjoining closet, which she offered to share with the children for the night. After partaking of a frugal meal, after several futile attempts at sustained conversation, our strange party disposed itself for the night. For myself, I could not sleep, for all the comfort of my camp bed, and memories of sound slumbers which it evoked. Was it the grave faces of the Russian peasants and the strange irony of their history and circumstances that haunted and kept the mind strung? Or were the senses fluttering under the presence of the fair woman whose soft breathing one could almost hear? God residing in those frames of steel, God incarnate in her voluptuousness!--Yet their God was not the God of the pantheist, but a stern, a militant God.... And thought wandered out into the stony by-paths, the home of the sprites that mock thought. The ingenious wickedness of man with his Churches and his heretics, and all the cowering crowd of Jews, Armenians, Poles!