employed in the case of a residence of many years. Did I adopt it, I
should very soon exhaust the reader's patience. I should have to take
him with me to a secluded village, and make him wait for me till I had
learned to speak the language. Thence he would have to accompany me to
a provincial town, and spend months in a public office, whilst I
endeavoured to master the mysteries of local self-government. After
this he would have to spend two years with me in a big library, where I
studied the history and literature of the country. And so on, and so
on. Even my journeys would prove tedious to him, as they often were to
myself, for he would have to drive with me many a score of weary miles,
where even the most zealous diary-writer would find nothing to record
beyond the names of the post-stations.

It will be well for me, then, to avoid the strictly chronological
method, and confine myself to a description of the more striking objects
and incidents that came under my notice. The knowledge which I derived
from books will help me to supply a running commentary on what I
happened to see and hear.

Instead of beginning in the usual way with St. Petersburg, I prefer for
many reasons to leave the description of the capital till some future
time, and plunge at once into the great northern forest region.

If it were possible to get a bird's-eye view of European Russia, the
spectator would perceive that the country is composed of two halves
widely differing from each other in character. The northern half is a
land of forest and morass, plentifully supplied with water in the form
of rivers, lakes, and marshes, and broken up by numerous patches of
cultivation. The southern half is, as it were, the other side of
the pattern--an immense expanse of rich, arable land, broken up by