Although thus an object of a general commiseration, which showed itself by the touching offerings of the poor, and even in the enigmatical benedictions of a tipsy priest, I nevertheless could practise charity in my turn, for many begged from me. One day in particular I can recall. It was, if I mistake not, at Saransk, as, with fetters on my feet, I stood waiting for a relay of horses, that I saw a man stretch out his hand towards me and ask for alms. He had on a military cap, and the many medals on his coat showed that he had served in several campaigns. He was, in fact, a soldier discharged from the service, and even I could recognise that he had once been in the Imperial Guard. What a strange contrast was here! A faithful and deserving servant of the Tzar begging his bread from a man who, a rebel to this same Tzar, was condemned by him to labour as a felon among felons! Without doubt, the most hapless being in the universe, more unhappy than even the convicts of Siberia, is the soldier of the Emperor of all the Russias. I do not speak of those twenty or five-and-twenty years of service which try his health and wear out his strength; I speak not either of the thousands of blows which he receives during his long martyrdom; but if, at the end of so many years passed under arms and under the rod, he were in his old age protected from want and misery, it would be well. At the most, however, the Russian government grants to some decrepid and attenuated victim of military discipline permission to settle upon the crown lands at some thousands of _verstes_ from his family, and from the place of his birth, without even giving him what is wanted for reclaiming the fields from which he is to scrape a living. If he marries he is obliged to remit to the Emperor every male child who attains the age of ten years; and thus he has the assurance that there is prepared for his son a life and an old age as miserable as his own. But it must not be supposed that all veterans are provided for even after this fashion. By far the greater number are told off to the fortresses or to the prisons of the government, or else sent back to their old homes, where they survive, old, poor, and unfit for work, as burdens upon families to whom they have become all but strangers; though the government, in giving them their discharge, has taken care to stipulate that there they shall neither be permitted to beg, nor allow their beards to grow. Unfortunately, this last order is more easily carried out than the first.