perfectly disgusting, a muddy-looking liquid with bits of wild duck and uncooked onion floating in it.... I once asked them to make me some soup from meat and to fry me some perch. They gave me soup too salt, dirty, with hard bits of skin instead of meat; and the perch was cooked with the scales on it. They make their cabbage soup from salt meat; they roast it too. They have just served me some salt meat roasted: it’s most repulsive; I chewed at it and gave it up. They drink brick tea. It is a decoction of sage and beetles--that’s what it is like in taste and appearance. By the way, I brought from Ekaterinburg a quarter of a pound of tea, five pounds of sugar, and three lemons. It was not enough tea and there is nowhere to buy any. In these scurvy little towns even the government officials drink brick tea, and even the best shops don’t keep tea at more than one rouble fifty kopecks a pound. I have to drink the sage brew. The distance apart of the posting stations depends on the distance of the nearest villages from each other--that is, 20 to 40 versts. The villages here are large, there are no little hamlets. There are churches and schools everywhere, the huts are of wood and there are some with two storeys. Towards the evening the road and the puddles begin to freeze, and at night there is a regular frost, one wants an extra fur coat ... Brrr! It’s jolting, for the mud is transformed into hard lumps. One’s soul is shaken inside out.... Towards daybreak one is fearfully exhausted by the cold, by the jolting and the jingle of the bells: one has a passionate longing for warmth and a bed. While they change horses one curls up in some corner and at once drops asleep, and a minute later the driver pulls at one’s sleeve and says: “Get up, friend, it is time to start.” On the second night I had acute toothache in my heels. It was unbearably painful. I wondered whether they were frostbitten. I can’t write more though. The “president,” that is the district police inspector, has come. We have made acquaintance and are beginning to talk. Goodbye till to-morrow. TOMSK, May 16. It seems my strong boots were the cause, being too tight at the back. My sweet Misha, if you ever have any children, which I have no doubt you will, the advice I bequeath to them is not to run after cheap goods. Cheapness in Russian goods is the label of worthlessness. To my mind it is better to go barefoot than to wear cheap boots. Picture my agony! I keep getting out of the chaise, sitting down on damp ground and taking off my boots to rest my heels. So comfortable in the frost! I had to buy felt over-boots in Ishim.... So I drove in felt boots till they collapsed from the mud and the damp.