When morning came--the particular morning I am now recalling--things were propitious. Two _telyegi_ stood awaiting our pleasure at the door, each with its pair of small Finn ponies ready harnessed and impatiently whisking away the horseflies with their long tails. The _telyegi_, I may explain, are springless carts upon four wheels. They are provided with so-called "cushions," which consist of a square bag of sacking with a certain amount of hay inside it. The sensations of the traveller who has once been bumped about in a _telyega_ over Russian roads are memorable--indeed, I have spent the rest of my days since my boyhood in wondering how in the world I managed to remain "all in one piece" throughout the awful joltings to which my body was submitted during those _telyega_ days. Has the reader ever seen a Russian country road? It is not a road at all, as we are accustomed to understand the term, but a mere succession of deep and wide holes worn in the natural sandy soil. The Finn ponies think nothing of such trifling drawbacks, however, and pursue their headlong course without regard to the feelings of the evil-entreated passengers behind them. Perhaps the good-natured creatures experience a mischievous delight in thus "taking it out" of those who weary their flesh by causing them to drag a heavy load at breakneck speed through all the heat and dust and breathlessness of a Russian summer day. The pair are harnessed in an original manner; one, the better trotter of the two, is between shafts, while his companion canters alongside, attached, in a happy-go-lucky way, to the vehicle by means of a couple of loose ropes, but otherwise free to do pretty much as he pleases, consequently he is sometimes close enough to his comrade to make that animal, if irritably inclined, put back his ears and snap at him as a gentle reminder that he is taking liberties, and sometimes a yard or two away, frisking over puddles or shying all over the road on his own account. When a pit of more than the average depth is encountered, both horses will jump it in preference to running down to the bottom and up again, and at such a moment the fate of the passenger in the cart behind is melancholy. He is tossed up into the air for all the world like a spun coin, sharing also the uncertain destiny of that coin as to the manner of his descent--whether "heads or tails." It must not be for one moment supposed that we, in the exuberance of our happiness, and in the all-accepting, unquestioning, all-enjoying spirit of the British schoolboy, cared a farthing for the depth or width of the very vilest hole that time and horseshoes ever wore in a Russian road; on the contrary, we loved the sensation of being sent flying up into the air every other minute, and if we came down upon the top of one another or of the luckless driver on his hard box-seat, or even into the six-inch dust of the road in the rear of the _telyega_, why, I believe we liked it all the better. As every one