THE START FROM MOSCOW. 69 



There is also the linega, an affair like the Irish 

 jaunting car. The people sit back to back between, 

 instead of over, the wheels, and the foot-board almost 

 touches the ground. A large family or public linega 

 carries as many as fourteen persons. 



A primitive drosky is also commonly met, a four- 

 wheeled low vehicle, with driver and passengers be- 

 striding a long cushioned plank, which connects the fore 

 and hind wheels. The telegas, or common country 

 wagons, are met in long strings, taking produce from 

 remote parts of the country. Goods of certain kinds 

 are still hauled into Moscow several hundred miles by 

 the lumbering telegas from districts that are far from a 

 railway. 



The Moscow-Kharkoff highway is a well-kept mac- 

 adam with a reservation of greensward, forty feet wide 

 on either side. On some of the communes through 

 which the road passes the side reservations are rented 

 from the government and preserved for hay ; on others 

 are herds of hobbled horses, tended by men and boys, 

 with dogs, and whips that are one of the curiosities of 

 the road. These enormous lashes are twice as large as 

 the largest bull-whacking whips of the old overland 

 days in the West. 



It seemed to the writer rather picayunish, in a coun- 

 try so prodigal of land as Russia, for the authorities to 

 " rent " the grass on these two narrow strips of side-road. 

 Our horses, which we usually rode over the sward, 

 might fairly be said to have walked through clover the 

 whole distance from Moscow ; yet we could not con- 

 scientiously permit them to dip down and take a 

 mouthful, for where the grass was fit for anything, 



