Even the vehicles exhibit a survival from mediævalism since each horse is harnessed beneath a _duga_ or piece of bent wood intended to strengthen the shafts, as it is by them alone the load is hauled, and traces are unknown. The _duga_, just as it is to-day, was used with the first wheeled vehicles introduced to Russia and will persist for aye. But the observant stranger will not lack entertainment in Moscow, especially if he shows generous toleration of primitive customs. If a house be building, the simple and superstitious working man, his original intention being now directed by the church to a manifestation of piety, will first raise above all the scaffolding a well made, often decorated, cross, so seeking a blessing from the good by the same sign that his early ancestors sought to appease the powers of evil. The carter, whose horse drops with heat sickness, will get the animal on his legs again and cause him three times to cross the _duga_ he purposely places thwartwise. To those versed in symbols an act as easy to understand as the every day remedy of the kitchenmaid who puts the poker across the bars of the grate to prevent the newly lighted fire from being extinguished--a not commendable practice yet effective epithem. Sprite ridden the Moscow peasant is still, but though "it" moves him to do many things of which he knows not the reason, merely obeying the prompting intuitively, he has forgotten what this "it" is that must be appeased. A bridge, a girder cantilever across a wide estuary or a couple of planks across a ditch, is not finished till some trifle has been cast into the water, in this the mujik being not unlike the skipper of a Grimsby trawler who tosses a new coin into the ocean before lowering his net. The enthusiast may attempt to trace the direct connection between baksheesh, nachai, and the extortion of gratuities generally, with the ancient practice of trifling sacrifices to some mythical demon; both old as the offer of a cock by Socrates to Æsculapius, and world-wide as the application of a door-key to the spine as a cure for nasal hæmorrhage. In such matters may hap Moscow is as other towns, and neither mediæval nor peculiar.