worn out it would mount up to a good forty.)

"Tell me, please, where can I get post-horses here?" the surveyor
asked of the station gendarme.

"What? Post-horses? There's no finding a decent dog for seventy
miles round, let alone post-horses. . . . But where do you want to
go?"

"To Dyevkino, General Hohotov's estate."

"Well," yawned the gendarme, "go outside the station, there are
sometimes peasants in the yard there, they will take passengers."

The surveyor heaved a sigh and made his way out of the station.

There, after prolonged enquiries, conversations, and hesitations,
he found a very sturdy, sullen-looking pock-marked peasant, wearing
a tattered grey smock and bark-shoes.

"You have got a queer sort of cart!" said the surveyor, frowning
as he clambered into the cart. "There is no making out which is the
back and which is the front."

"What is there to make out? Where the horse's tail is, there's the
front, and where your honour's sitting, there's the back."

The little mare was young, but thin, with legs planted wide apart
and frayed ears. When the driver stood up and lashed her with a
whip made of cord, she merely shook her head; when he swore at her
and lashed her once more, the cart squeaked and shivered as though
in a fever. After the third lash the cart gave a lurch, after the
fourth, it moved forward.

"Are we going to drive like this all the way?" asked the surveyor,
violently jolted and marvelling at the capacity of Russian drivers
for combining a slow tortoise-like pace with a jolting that turns
the soul inside out.

"We shall ge-et there!" the peasant reassured him. "The mare is
young and frisky. . . . Only let her get running and then there is
no stopping her. . . . No-ow, cur-sed brute!"

It was dusk by the time the cart drove out of the station. On the
surveyor's right hand stretched a dark frozen plain, endless and
boundless. If you drove over it you would certainly get to the other
side of beyond. On the horizon, where it vanished and melted into
the sky, there was the languid glow of a cold autumn sunset. . . .
On the left of the road, mounds of some sort, that might be last
year's stacks or might be a village, rose up in the gathering
darkness. The surveyor could not see what was in front as his whole
field of vision on that side was covered by the broad clumsy back
of the driver. The air was still, but it was cold and frosty.

"What a wilderness it is here," thought the surv