_Izbouchka_ are little houses built at great intervals for the accommodation of travellers, and are to be found from the Oural Mountains to Véliki-Oustiong; you find there bread, salt fish, turnips, radishes, cabbages and _kvass_ (a liquor made from cider), and sometimes, though rarely, brandy. In some of these inns, that is to say, in the more spacious ones, there is to be found hay and corn for the horses. Their owners buy in the provisions, and it is said make a good profit on these strange hotels, which in general are kept by one old man, or by a couple as miserable as they are decrepid. One evening I met a train of _yamstchiks_ who were on their way back from the fair at Irbite, and were halting to rest their horses; but I did not remain with them. I knew that I was nearing the summit of the Oural range, and a superstitious feeling impelled me towards it as to the culminating point of my fate. At last I reached the top of the pass. It was a fine night; the moon illuminated with its full splendour a glorious but fantastic scene, where the gnarled shadows of the trees, and of gigantic masses of rocks, were filing far upon the immense expanse of snow. A silence so solemn as to be almost religious in its unbroken stillness reigned around, except when at times a dry metallic sound struck upon the ear as the stones cracked and split from the intensity of the frost; and yet nature, rude and wild as she appeared to me at this time, and under this dress, was to me, alas! a friend more pitiful than any of the civilised beings around; _she_, at least, never asked me for my passport! It was with difficulty that I kept my mind from dwelling on spirits from another world, from recurring to the fairy sprites and other tales to which I had been accustomed during my childhood in the Ukraine, so much were they recalled by the strange and sinister-looking forms which the moon revealed, while in her rays their outlines assumed monstrous proportions. Indeed, in the eyes of any Ukraine child might not I myself have easily passed for no less a person than the ‘great demon of the night,’ as I stood there in my strange dress, beard, eyebrows, and moustaches, all crusted with frosty rime, wandering thus among the shadows of the forest, myself but another shade?