assports were required. Once
we spent an entire month incognito. At Kazan, our balcony commanded a
full view of the police department of registry, directly opposite. The
landlord sniffed disdainfully at the mention of our passports, and I am
sure that we should not have been asked for them at all, had not one of
the officials, who chanced to be less wilted by the intense heat than
his fellows,--they had been gazing lazily at us, singly and in
battalions, in the intervals of their rigorous idleness, for the last
four and twenty hours,--suddenly taken a languid interest in us about
one hour before our departure. The landlord said he was "simply
ridiculous." On another occasion, a waiter in a hotel recognized the
Russians who were with us as neighbors of his former master in the days
of serfdom. He suggested that he would arrange not to have our passports
called for at all, since they might be kept overtime, and our departure
would thus be delayed, and we be incommoded. Only one of our friends had
even taken the trouble to bring a "document;" but the whole party spent
three days under the protection of this ex-serf. Of course, we bespoke
his attendance for ourselves, and remembered that little circumstance in
his "tea-money." This practice of detaining passports arbitrarily, from
which the ex-serf was protecting us, prevails in some localities,
judging from the uproar about it in the Russian newspapers. It is
contrary to the law, and can be resisted by travelers who have time,
courage, and determination. It appears to be a device of the landlords
at watering places and summer resorts generally, who desire to detain
guests. I doubt whether the police have anything to do with it. What we
paid the ex-serf for was, practically, protection against his employer.

Our one experience of this device was coupled with a good deal of
amusement, and initiated us into some of the laws of the Russian
post-office as well. To begin my story intelligibly, I must premise that
no Russian could ever pronounce or spell our name correctly unaided. A
worse name to put on a Russian official document, with its _H_ and its
double _o_, never was invented! There is no letter _h_ in the Russian
alphabet, and it is customary to supply the deficiency with the letter
_g_, leaving the utterer to his fate as to which of the two legitimate
sounds--the foreign or the native--he is to produce. It affords a
test of cultivation parallel to that involved in giving