To add to his troubles and discomfort, though the month was April--usually the most serene of the year in Russia--snow-flakes were beginning to fall, rendering yet greater the gloom of the gathering night. "I was to have found a bridge here. Can that Livonian villain, Podatchkine, have deluded, and then left me to my fate?" He knew that in his rear, the way by which he had come, lay half-frozen morasses, heathy wastes, and forests of spruce, larch, and silver-leaved firs--vast natural magazines for supplying all Europe with masts and spars--the haunt of the wolf and bear; he knew that to linger or to return were worse than to advance, and that he must cross the stream and seek quarters and guidance at the château, the name of which was yet unknown to him. This was, if possible, the worst season for passing the Louga, which is always deepest and most navigable in spring. It rises in the district of Novgorod; and, after traversing a country full of vast forests for more than 180 miles, falls into the Gulf of Finland. Balgonie buttoned tightly his holster-flaps, hooked up his sabre, assured himself that an important dispatch with which he was entrusted was safe in an inner pocket, and prepared seriously for the perilous task of swimming his horse across the stream. Again he looked anxiously at the château, the abode evidently of some wealthy noble or boyar. Its outline had almost disappeared in the increasing obscurity; the last faint gleams of the west had faded away on the onion-shaped roofs of its turrets, and a central dome of polished copper, which was cut into facets like the outside of a pine-apple (for there is much of the Oriental in the old Russian architecture); but lights were beginning to sparkle cheerfully through its double-sashed windows upon the feathery and the funeral-like foliage of the solemn pine woods. Could those who were comfortably, perhaps luxuriously seated within, but know that there was a poor human being on the eve, perhaps, of perishing helplessly amid the dark flow of that deep and roaring river! "Courage, friend Charlie!" said the rider to himself; and then he hallooed loudly, as if to attract attention, but did so in vain. The night was becoming a very severe one; the flakes of snow fell thicker and thicker on the gusty and cutting blast. "Ah! if I should perish here--such a fate!" thought he, shuddering. "Shall I be swept down this black and horrid stream, the Louga, to be cast a drowned corpse upon its banks, to be found stripped and buried by wondering but unpitying serfs and boors; or shall I be torn and mangled by bears and wolves; or borne even to the Gulf of Finland, far, far away, having thus an obscure and wretched fate, without winning the name I had hoped to gain--forgotten even by those who wronged me in Scotland, the land that never more shall be a home to me!"