CHAP. ii. SLEDGING. 13 



and cold with brilliant sunshine. The last night and day it 

 was intensely cold, from 2 to 4 below zero. There was a 

 considerable amount of traffic on the roads, and we frequently 

 met long lines of sledges laden with hides, tar barrels, frozen 

 sides of beef, hay, flax, &c. Many peasants were sledging 

 about from place to place, but we saw very few travellers 

 with government horses. The country was covered with 

 about two feet of snow. It was rarely flat, at first a sort of 

 open rolling prairie land with plenty of timber and well 

 studded with villages. Afterwards it became more hilly and 

 almost entirely covered with forest. In many cases the road 

 followed the course of a river, frequently crossing it and 

 often continuing for some miles on its frozen surface. The 

 track was then marked out with small fir-trees stuck into 

 the snow at intervals. During the whole journey we met 

 only one person who could speak either English, French, 

 or German. This was at Slavodka, where we bought some 

 fancy bread and Kussian butter from a German baker, from 

 Hesse Cassel. Jackdaws and hooded crows were the com- 

 monest birds in the open country, feeding for the most part 

 upon the droppings of the horses on the roads. They were 

 in splendid plumage and wonderfully clean. Many of the 

 jackdaws had an almost white ring round the neck and would 

 doubtless be the Corvus collaris of some authors, but, so far as 

 we were able to see, this cannot be considered as a good 

 species. We frequently saw almost every intermediate 

 variety in the same flock. During the first few days we 

 noticed many colonies of nests in the plantations, but whether 

 these would be tenanted by rooks later on in the season, or 



