It is spring--such spring as is vouchsafed to the high latitudes, and I am in my night ambush, prepared to welcome any living thing that is good enough to come forth from its sanctuary within reeds or forest, and to parade itself in the open for my inspection. My ambush is a pine-branch tent, or _shalashka_, the little edifice which has been my refuge and centre of observation for many a cold northern night--spring-time nights, indeed, but nights of more degrees of frost than the sportsman or naturalist of temperate Britain has dreamed of in his coldest excursions into the realms of imagination. My tent on this occasion is not pitched upon one of those open spaces in mid-forest, whereon the blackcock love to hold their nocturnal or early-matutinal tournaments, where the laughing willow-grouse--that faithful lover--sports with his pretty white mate, and the dark forest trees form a romantic background to the proceedings of both. To-night I am placed in the midst of the marshy approach to a wide sheet of water--an annex, in fact, to the great Lake Ladoga. Fifty yards or more in front of me the waters, but lately released from their entire subjection to the yoke of winter, may be heard softly lapping the shore in a series of gentle kisses, stolen in the darkness; for it is but three in the morning--if that, and I can see nothing but the broad wing of Night still stretched over land and lake. On either side of the _shalashka_ there extends, I believe, a spur of moorland; behind is the forest: never far away in a Russian landscape. I am still in the dreamy, semi-conscious condition superinduced by the long ride through gloom and silence which has intervened between supper last evening, twenty miles away, and my arrival here. The little ponies to whom we are indebted for our conveyance in perfect safety, through darkness which even the marvellous eyes of a Finn pony could hardly have penetrated, are some little way off behind us, hidden among the pine trees, waiting with the philosophic content of their tribe until it shall have pleased us to accomplish the object of our nightly pilgrimage and return to them.