knows, a special Providence watches over drunken men and school-boys, and I have often reflected that we must have caused our particular bodyguard a terrible amount of anxiety, and kept it very hard at work during these wild _telyega_ drives of ours at Mourino, for we were racing, most of the time, with the wheels of the two carts interlaced, the horses--all four of them--galloping _ventre à terre_, and the demented Russian drivers--quite as far gone in lunacy as our British selves--shouting at the top of their voices and bumping about half in air and half in cart, like a couple of demon Jehus let loose for the occasion, and for our especial and particularly complete destruction; and yet I cannot remember that any one was ever hurt! Truly that special Providence of ours was well up to its arduous duties, and performed them admirably. Sairki was reached at last, and the horses put up at the village. As for us, we unpacked the carts before a group of admiring Finnish children; for Sairki, like many a score of other villages within twenty miles of the Tsar's capital, is inhabited exclusively by Finns, who cannot speak a word of Russian. Hand-nets and rods were got out; the crawfish meat was produced (extremely unsavoury by this time, owing to the intense heat of the day, but all the better for that from the point of view of the crawfish, who likes his dinner to be attractive to his olfactory senses); huge fishing-baskets were strapped upon our shoulders, containing our food at present, but to be used for another purpose soon, and away we headed for the riverside. The Ochta is a tributary of the Neva, into which it flows close to St. Petersburg--a pretty little river as one would wish to see, if he cares for the sort of scenery that Ruysdael loved to depict. Down by the river there grew countless clusters of leafy young birches and aspens, and to these our attention was first directed, for from them we must draw one of the essential items of our stock-in-trade. Provided with large knives as we were, we soon possessed ourselves of the necessary number of long sticks, about a dozen each, and stripped the leaves off to the end. In order to explain the exact object of these sticks, I will now, with the reader's permission, make him acquainted with the _modus operandi_ of the scientific crawfisher. I have said already that a lump of meat is required. This is cut into small sections of about an inch and a half square, one of which is firmly tied to the end of each stick with a piece of string or "machalka," the birch-bark ribbon known to gardeners. This is the nastiest part of the proceedings, and it is better to get a friend to do it for you if you can. The preliminaries being thus completed, the next thing is to take the twelve baited sticks one by one and place them in the water, the meat downwards and resting on the bottom, while the top end of the stick is allowed to project a foot or so above the surface and to rest against the bank.