they were dressing, demanding their passports, and setting a guard at
their doors; after which, gendarmes in disguises (which they were clever
enough to penetrate) followed them all over the country? Why was it thus
with them, and not with us? The _why_ ripened gradually. We inquired if
the passports were not wanted.

"No; if you intend to remain only a few days, it is not worth while to
register them," was the startling reply; and those wretched, unwieldy
parchments remained in our possession, even after we had announced that
we did not meditate departing for some time. I hesitate to set down the
whole truth about the anxiety they cost us for a while. How many
innocent officers, in crack regiments (as we discovered when we learned
the uniforms), in search of a breakfast or a dinner, did we not take for
the police upon our tracks, in search of those concealed documents! Our
excitement was ministered to by the Tatar waiters, who, not having
knowledge of our nationality, mistook us for English people, and wrecked
our nerves by making our tea as strong and black as beer, with a view to
large "tea-money" for this delicate attention to our insular tastes.

If no one wanted those documents, what were _we_ to do with them? Wear
them as breastplates (folded), or as garments (full size)? No pocket of
any sex would tolerate them, and we had been given to understand by
veracious (?) travelers that it was as much as our lives were worth to
be separated from them for a single moment. At the end of a week we
forced the hotel to take charge of them. They were registered, and
immediately thrown back on our hands. Then we built lean-tos on our
petticoats to hold them, and carried them about until they looked aged
and crumpled and almost frayed, like ancestral parchments. We even slept
with them under our pillows. At last we also were nearly worn out, and
we tossed those Sindbad passports into a drawer, then into a trunk.