I9 2 THROUGH RUSSIA ON A MUSTANG. 



a comically open manner. We were in the Ekaterinos* 

 lav office probably an hour, and during that time ob- 

 served three separate cases that took place under our 

 very noses with hardly an effort at secrecy. The man 

 who seemed to come in for the lion's share of the 

 bribes was a little bald-headed fellow who wore a re- 

 mark? b!y high collar. 



He was the secretary, who had to fill out passports, 

 prepare petitions, and the like. When seated at his 

 desk his back was turned to my point of observation, 

 and when he was bent over, writing, his enormous 

 collar concealed all but the baldest and shiniest part of 

 his head. And when he looked up and exposed the 

 remnants of hair that still clung to the sides, it was as 

 though a young chicken had just succeeded in pecking 

 a hole in its shell, sufficiently large to peep out and 

 take a curious inventory of its surroundings. 



The head did, in fact, take very frequent inventories, 

 not exactly of its surroundings, but of the group of 

 civilians who stood huddled up in a humbly submissive 

 attitude, hats in hand, near the door. 



Russian officials who occupy situations where bribes 

 are offered in the presence of other people always wear 

 short office jackets with pockets ready to hand at the 

 sides. The little man with the high collar wore one 

 of these jackets, as a matter of course, and the dex- 

 terity with which he could transfer paper money from 

 the hand of a petitioner to the pockets in it was beauti- 

 ful to see. There was nothing particularly rapid about 

 the movement, nothing of legerdemain, in which the 

 quickness of the hand is relied on to deceive the eye, 

 but there was an elegant gracefulness in the act that 



