ed, never addressed;
round and round and round, a walking machine, with eyes that did not
flash, with teeth that did not threaten, with hoofs that did not
strike; round and round the dull day long. I knew what a horse's life
should be, entangled with the life of a master: adventurous, troubled,
thrilled; petted and opposed, loved and abused; to-day the ringing
city pavement underfoot, and the buzz of beasts and men in the market
place; to-morrow the yielding turf under tickled flanks, and the lone
whinny of scattered mates. How empty the existence of the treadmill
horse beside this! As empty and endless and dull as the life of almost
any woman in Polotzk, had I had eyes to see the likeness.

But to my ablutions!

We undress in a room leading directly from the entry, and furnished
only with benches around the walls. There is no screen or other
protection against the drafts rushing in every time the door is
opened. When we enter the bathing-room we are confused by a babel of
sounds--shrill voices of women, hoarse voices of attendants, wailing
and yelping of children, and rushing of water. At the same time we are
smitten by the heat of the room and nearly suffocated by clouds of
steam. We find at last an empty bench, and surround ourselves with a
semicircle of wooden pails, collected from all around the room.
Sometimes two women in search of pails lay hold of the same pail at
the same moment, and a wrangle ensues, in the course of which each
disputant reminds the other of all her failings, nicknames, and
undesirable connections, living, dead, and unborn; until an attendant
interferes, with more muscle than argument, punctuating the sentence
of justice with newly coined expletives suggested by the occasion. The
centre of the room, where the bathers fill their pails at the faucets,
is a field of endless battle, especially on a crowded day. The
peaceful women seated within earshot stop their violent scrubbing, to
the relief of unwilling children, while they attend to the liveliest
of the quarrels.

I like to watch the _poll_, that place of torture and heroic
endurance. It is a series of steps rising to the ceiling, affording a
gradually mounting temperature. The bather who wants to enjoy a
violent sweating rests full length for a few minutes on each step,
while an attendant administers several hearty strokes of a stinging
besom. Sometimes a woman climbs too far, and is brought down in a
faint. On the poll, also, the cuppi