In spite of the snowstorm I continued to travel, and had passed the towns of Soederhamn, Hudicksvall, Sundsvall, and Hernoesand, with their streets deep in snow. On the fifth day we had great difficulty in getting along. In some places the ploughs had not passed over the road since two days before, for we were now going through a very sparsely inhabited country. Some parts of the road were honeycombed with holes about fifteen inches deep, made in this way: each horse that had passed stepped in the tracks of the one that had preceded him, and made the holes deeper and deeper, which made walking very difficult for the poor animals. The further north I went the deeper became the snow, and travelling became tedious. Our sleigh tumbled on one side or the other, upsetting before we could say "Boo!" At each effort the poor horse made to extricate himself, we had either to get out of the sleigh or be thrown out. The poor brute would often sink to his neck, and sometimes almost to his head when he got out of the snow-plough's track! In order to make some headway and to make up for the slowness of the horses and bad roads, I travelled sixteen and eighteen hours a day, and when I came to a post station I was pretty tired. The ploughs I now met were drawn by six horses and attended by four or five men. The struggles of the poor animals as they sank continually in the deep soft snow and tried to extricate themselves, were sometimes painful to behold. We always had to be careful to drive in the middle of the road, where the snow had been cleared and packed by the snow-ploughs and the rollers. Sometimes we could not tell where it was, for the land around was deeply buried and the track of the snow-ploughs was hidden by the fresh-fallen snow. When my driver made a mistake and drove one way or the other outside of the track, the first intimation we had was that of the horse sinking suddenly, being ourselves upset or nearly so. Then we had a lot of trouble putting him on the track again. After several of these mishaps, the driver would say to me: "Now I am going to let the horse go by himself. He is accustomed every year to go in deep snow on this road and he will know the way." "You are right," I would reply. When let alone the horse would walk very slowly, and he would hesitate each time he put either his right or his left foot on the snow, to make sure he was on the right track. If he thought he was on the left of the road, it was his left foot that came down first; if he thought he was to the right of the road, he put his right foot down, but not until he had made sure that he was right. If he saw that he had made a mistake, he turned quickly to one side or the other.