Our travellers remained at St. Petersburg until the 30th of December, amusing themselves with learning the German language, and in seeing sights, and then departed for Moscow, travelling at the same prodigious rate as when they fled thither from Abo. “Our mode of travelling,” says Heber, “deserves describing, both as very comfortable in itself, and as being entirely different from every thing in England. We performed the journey in kabitkas, the carriages usually employed by the Russians in their winter journeys: they are nothing more than a very large cradle, well covered with leather, and placed on a sledge, with a leather curtain in front; the luggage is placed at the bottom, the portmanteaus serving for an occasional seat, and the whole covered with a mattress, on which one or more persons can lie at full length, or sit supported by pillows. In this attitude, and well wrapped up in furs, one can scarcely conceive a more luxurious mode of getting over a country, when the roads are good, and the weather not intense; but in twenty-four or twenty-five degrees of frost (Reaumur), no wrapping can keep you quite warm; and in bad roads, of which we have had some little experience, the jolting is only equalled by the motion of a ship in a storm.” From Moscow, where they arrived on the 3d of January, 1806, they shortly afterward made an excursion eastward to Yaroslav, on the banks of the Volga, during which Heber made the remarkable discovery that the Russian clergy almost universally were inimical to the government; being more connected than most other classes of men with the peasants, many of whose sufferings and oppressions they shared. They witnessed at Yaroslav a wolf-hunt on the frozen Volga. It should rather, however, be termed a “wolf-baiting;” for the animals, which had been previously caught for the purpose, were at once set upon by a number of dogs, and beaten almost blind by the long whips of savages, whom I cannot term hunters. A couple of hares were likewise chased upon the ice by Siberian greyhounds, very beautiful creatures, with silky hair and a fan tail, which, though less swift, were said to be more hardy than our greyhounds.