STOPPED BY THE POLICE. 185 



in their exceedingly suspicious minds all known cir- 

 cumstances connected with us. Of course, we were not 

 told this in a straightforward manner, blunt honesty 

 in such matters being entirely foreign to the police 

 authorities of Russia, except those at the top of the 

 tree in St. Petersburg, who have nothing to fear in case 

 of making a mistake. The provincial tchinovnik, when 

 called upon to take action upon anything outside his 

 ordinary routine, is prone to lose his senses and com- 

 mit some remarkable piece of folly. His logic is sur- 

 prisingly eccentric to begin with, and he is always pain- 

 fully aware of being between the Scylla of underzeal, 

 which may cost him his official head, and the Charyb- 

 dis of " putting his foot in it " through meddling with 

 what he does not understand. 



The officials of Ekaterinoslav could not believe that 

 two horsemen might ride through the country and be 

 neither spies of some foreign government, secret mis- 

 sionaries bent on corrupting the allegiance of the Ortho- 

 dox moujiks, political propagandists disseminating the 

 seeds of sedition, nor Nihilists inciting them to rebell- 

 ion against the Czar. All these possibilities and a 

 hundred variations of these, occurred to the inscrutable 

 minds of the tchinovniks of Ekaterinoslav in connec- 

 tion with our appearance. 



They could not understand my American passport. 

 " It should have been written in Russian." Sascha's 

 document was no passport at all — a fact that we had had 

 very good reason to know without further enlighten- 

 ment here. " Why hadn't I a special passport grant- 

 ing the right to travel through Russia in this most ex- 

 traordinary manner?" 



