THROUGH RUSSIA ON A MUSTANG. 



CHAPTER I. 



ST. PETERSBURG. 



FOR the second time I was bound for the Land of 

 the Czar. But this time I was to enter it by a 

 different door, in a different manner, and for a differ- 

 ent purpose. My previous entrance had been inci- 

 dental ; this was to be special. In 1886, when on my 

 bicycle ride across Asia, Russian suspicion had barred 

 my road through Turkestan, and the Afghans had ar- 

 rested me and turned me back into Persia, after I had 

 pierced into their forbidden country to within three 

 hundred miles of Quetta. So, in June of that year, 

 when, in order to overcome this hundred-league bar- 

 rier it became necessary to reach the free roads of 

 India by a roundabout journey of six thousand miles, 

 I saw something of Russia in the Caucasus and on the 

 shores of the Caspian Sea. 



My impressions were not favorable to trie Russian 

 rule. At the wharves of Baku, I, for the first time in 

 my life, had seen smart, uniformed policemen strike 

 people smashing blows in the face with clenched fist, 

 and kick them most brutally in the stomach, for what 

 in England or America would have called forth a mere 

 gruff order to " move on," or at most a threatening 

 push. From page 257, vol. 2, " Around the World on 



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