We started back to Alexandrovo with the first train without taking any breakfast, not wishing to have anything to do with these detestable Prussians. On arriving at the station, whilst taking coffee, we received the longed-for telegram, and as we had to wait till evening for the North Express, we decided to drive to Tzekhotzinsk, a small Polish watering place, which is only a few miles distant from Alexandrovo. The journey was extremely trying on account of the excessive heat, and the flies which were pertinacious. We proceeded along a sandy road under a broiling sun. At last we arrived. The Casino, a red-brick house hidden among the trees, suggested repose and comfort. After having appeased our hunger and quenched our thirst in the restaurant, we took a room and locked ourselves up to have a good rest. After a refreshing nap, Sergy went to explore the place. He returned after his stroll rather dissatisfied with Tzekhotzinsk, and we decided to return to Alexandrovo at once. We were surely taken here for a pair of unlawful conjugators of the verb “to love,” for we merely came to perch like a bird for a couple of hours, then to fly away. When the North Express drew up at Alexandrovo we went to have a try for a carriage to ourselves and had to give a good tip to the conductor who ushered us into an empty compartment, assuring us that we should have it to ourselves as far as Berlin; but at the first stopping another guard came to announce that we had been placed here by mistake, this car being bound for another direction. He proposed for us a compartment in the neighbouring carriage; but if he imagined that he was going to be as liberally recompensed as his cheat of a companion, he was very much mistaken, for he did not receive even one kreutzer. We got thoroughly punished for it, however, for when the train was going to start and we had just composed ourselves for deep slumber, a lady and gentleman were ushered into our compartment, an elderly Englishman on the wrong side of fifty, particularly nasty-looking, and his spouse, a young person of about nineteen, very nice to look at. Her husband called her “Baby,” and bestowed caresses upon her all the way; but she didn’t seem to care a cent about him and responded very phlegmatically to his advances. Well, to have married such an individual she must have had great courage, with not so much as a pair of tongs would I have touched him, and couldn’t have married him if he was the only man in the whole world. CHAPTER XXI BOULOGNE-SUR-MER