A cold day in the middle of April had passed away; a pale and cheerless sun, that had cast no heat on the leafless scenery and the half-frozen marshes that border the Louga in Western Russia, had sunk, and the darkness of a stormy night came on rapidly. The keen blast of the north, that swept the arid scalps of the Dudenhof (the only range of hills that traverses the ancient Ingria), was bellowing through a gorge, where the Louga poured in foam upon its passage to the Gulf of Finland, between steep banks that were covered by gloomy pines, when the speaker, a mounted officer in Russian uniform, who seemed too surely to have lost his way, reined up a weary and mud-covered horse on the margin of the stream, and by the light that yet lingered on the tops of the tall pines, and gilded faintly the metal-covered domes of a distant building on the opposite bank, looked hopelessly about him for the means of crossing the dangerous river. "Where am I?" he repeated, almost despairingly; for, as Schiller sings in his "Song of the Bell,"-- "Man fears the kingly lion's tread; Man fears the tiger's fangs of terror; And still the dreadliest of the dread Is man himself in error!" Though clad in the uniform of the Russian Regiment of Smolensko, which was raised in the famous duchy of that name, the traveller was neither Muscovite nor Calmuck, Cossack nor Tartar, but a cool, wary, and determined young Briton, one of the many Scottish officers whom misfortune or ambition had drawn into the Russian service, both by sea and land, from the time of Peter the Great down to the beginning of the present century; for many Scottish officers served in the Russian fleet with Admiral Greig at the famous bombardment of Varna: and it was such volunteers as these that first taught the barbarous hordes of the growing empire the true science of war and the necessity for discipline. The rider's green uniform, faced with scarlet velvet and richly laced with gold, was covered by a thick grey pelisse (like our present patrol-jackets), trimmed with black wolf's fur: he wore a scarlet forage cap with a square top, long boots that came above the knee, and a Turkish sabre that had once armed a pasha of more tails than one. "Swim the river I must," he muttered, after having traversed the valley in vain, looking for a bridge, boat, or raft of timber; "but, egad, death may be the penalty. Well," he added, with a gleam of ire in his dark grey eyes and a bitter smile on his lip, "there was a time, perhaps, when I little thought that I, Charlie Balgonie, would find a nameless grave in this land of timber, hemp, and salted hides, where caviare is a luxury, train-oil a liqueur, and the air of Siberia deemed healthy for all who have any absurd ideas of political freedom, or are silly enough to imagine that a man may be the lord of his own proper person."