when it stops and starting when it starts, without regard to your own health, comfort, or convenience. On the contrary, you may ride in your own sleigh or carriage, and have it drawn by post horses. You may travel at the rate of 175 miles in twenty-four hours, or twenty-four miles in 175 hours, just as you feel inclined. You may stop when you like, where you like, and for as long a time as you like, and when you are ready to move on you have only to
order out your horses and get into you vehicle. It makes no difference in what part you may wish our to go. Send your padarózhnaya to the nearest post station, and in twenty minutes you will be riding away at the rate of ten miles an hour, with your postal order in your pocket and a hundred relays of fresh horses distributed at intervals along your route.
The established rate of payment for transportation over the post routes of Western Siberia seems to an American absurdly low. It amounts, including the compensation of the driver, to 118 cent per mile for every horse, or of 338 cents per mile for the usual tróika, or team of three. In other words, two persons can travel in their own carriage with a team of three horses a distance of twenty miles for 68 cents, or 34 cents each. I used to feel almost ashamed sometimes to wake up a driver at a post station, in the middle of a stormy night, compel him to harness three horses and drive us twenty miles over a dark, miry, and perhaps dangerous road, and then offer him for this service the pitiful sum of 68 cents. Trifling and inadequate, however, as such compensation may seem, it is large enough to tempt into this field of enterprise hundreds of peasant farmers who compete with the Government post by furnishing what are known as vólni or "free" horses, for the transportation of travelers
