The departure of a marching party from the forwarding prison was generally fixed at eight o’clock in the morning, when the _telyegas_, or country carts, for the conveyance of the sick and infirm, began to collect in front of the prison gate. Next appeared the prison blacksmith with his anvil and portable forge, to test the fetters as the convicts came forth, and after he had satisfied himself that the rivets were fast and the basils had not been bent, an under officer doled out ten kopecks to each individual, and the convicts were formed in line, by classes, for convenience of inspection and calling the roll. The hard-labour convicts removed their gray visorless caps to show that their crowns were half shaved according to regulation. From the other sides of their heads hung a mat of long, coarse and dishevelled hair. At length the whole party, numbering from three to four hundred, assembled in the street; each convict carried a gray linen two-bushel bag for the storage of his personal effects. Many possessed tea-kettles, dangling from the waist belts that supported the leg irons, and one or two might be seen with a favourite dog in their arms. All the men were dressed alike in long gray overcoats over coarse linen shirts and loose gray trousers. The women wore no distinctive uniform, but were dressed mostly in peasant costume with gaily coloured handkerchiefs on their heads. Square foot-wrappers of gray linen were used in lieu of stockings and all wore the _koty_, or low shoes, while they lasted, but they were of such rotten, worthless material that they fell to pieces in a couple of days and the wretched wayfarers went barefooted. The _telyegas_ were carts of the rudest description, one-horsed and without springs or seats, and the occupants, sick and suffering, old, infirm and emaciated, lay at the bottom on a scanty layer of grass. A doctor’s certificate was essential to secure a place in the carts, and a sharp lookout was kept to weed out the malingerers. In one year more than twenty-five hundred broken-down persons were conveyed to their destination in as many as 658 carts.