But to the man without roubles in his pocket, Russian officialdom is
not so gracious. By the expenditure of a few more coins I got my dog
through the Customs without trouble, and had leisure to look about
me. A miserable object was being badgered by half a dozen men in
uniform, and he--his lean face puckered up into a snarl--was
returning them snappish answers; the whole scene suggested some half-
starved mongrel being worried by school-boys. A slight informality
had been discovered in his passport, so a fellow traveller with whom
I had made friends informed me. He had no roubles in his pocket, and
in consequence they were sending him back to St. Petersburg--some
eighteen hours' journey--in a wagon that in England would not be
employed for the transport of oxen.

It seemed a good joke to Russian officialdom; they would drop in
every now and then, look at him as he sat crouched in a corner of the
waiting-room, and pass out again, laughing. The snarl had died from
his face; a dull, listless indifference had taken its place--the look
one sees on the face of a beaten dog, after the beating is over, when
it is lying very still, its great eyes staring into nothingness, and
one wonders whether it is thinking.

The Russian worker reads no newspaper, has no club, yet all things
seem to be known to him. There is a prison on the banks of the Neva,
in St. Petersburg. They say such things are done with now, but up
till very recently there existed a small cell therein, below the
level of the ice, and prisoners placed there would be found missing a
day or two afterwards, nothing ever again known of them, except,
perhaps, to the fishes of the Baltic. They talk of such like things
among themselves: the sleigh-drivers round their charcoal fire, the
field-workers going and coming in the grey dawn, the factory workers,