Occasionally it happens that the port-holes are opened while there still flickers a little blue flame above the whitening embers. In this case there is death in the stove. The carbonic-acid gas, which is still proceeding from the burning charcoal, enters the room, and produces asphyxia, or at all events some of its symptoms. If you have not time, or if you are already too weak, to open the door when you find yourself attacked by _ougar_ (as the Russians call this gas), you had better throw the first thing you have at hand through the window; and the cold air, rushing rapidly into the room, will save you. A foreigner unaccustomed to the hot apartments of Russia will scarcely perceive the presence of _ougar_ until he is already seriously affected by it; and in this manner the son of the Persian ambassador lost his life, some years since, in one of the principal hotels of Moscow. A native, however, if the stove should chance to be "covered" before the wood is thoroughly charred, will detect the presence of the fatal gas almost instantaneously; and having done so, the best remedy he can adopt for the headache and sickness, which even then will inevitably follow, is to rush into the open air, and cool his temples by copious applications of snow. Persons who are almost insensible from the effect of _ougar_ have to be carried out and rolled in the snow,--a process which speedily restores them to their natural condition. One morning there was a fall of snow; and the cream was brought in from the country in jars wrapped carefully round with matting to prevent its freezing. Hundreds of cabbages and thousands of potatoes, similarly protected, were purchased and stowed away. Furlongs of wood (in Russia wood is sold by the foot), were laid up in the courtyard; an inspector of stoves arrived to see that every _peitchka_ was in proper working order; and an examiner and fitter-in of windows was summoned to adjust the usual extra sash. At last the windows had been made fast, each pane being at the same time reputtied into its frame. On the window-sill, in the space between the outer and inner panes, was something resembling a long deep line of snow, which was, however, merely a mass of cotton-wool placed there as an additional protection against the external air. Indeed, the winds of the Russian winter have such powers of penetration that, in a room guarded by _triple_ windows, besides shutters closed with the greatest exactness, I have seen the curtains slightly agitated when the howling outside was somewhat louder than usual. "The wind," says Gregorovitch in his _Winter's Tale_, "howls like a dog; and like a dog will bite the feet and calves of those who have not duly provided themselves with fur-goloshes and doubly-thick pantaloons." Such a wind must not be suffered to intrude into any house intended to be habitable.