52 THE FOREST LANDS OF NORTHERN RUSSIA. 
it with wisps of straw is vain. We tie it with bands and 
belts ; but nothing will induce it to lie down. How can 
we blame it? Trunks have rights as well as men; they 
claim a proper place to lie in; and my poor box has just 
been tossed into this tarantass, and told to lie quiet on logs 
and stones. 
‘Still more fitful than this trunk are the lumber verte- 
bre in my spine. They hate this jolting day and night ; 
they have been jerked out of their sockets, pounded into 
dust, and churned into curds. But then these mutineers 
are under more control than the trunk ; and when they 
_ begin to murmur seriously I still them in a moment by 
hints of taking them a drive through Bitter Creek. 
‘But, ah! here is Holmogory. Holmogory was the 
birthplace of Lomonosoff, a philosopher and a poet of the 
last century, whom his countrymen greatly honour-—— 
here is Holmogory, standing on a bluff above the river, 
pretty and bright, with her golden crops, her grassy roads, 
her pink and white houses, her boats on the water, and 
her stretches of yellow sand; a village with open spaces ; 
here a church, there a cloister, gay with gilt and paint, 
and shanties of a better class than you see in such small 
country towns; and forests of birch and pine around her 
.—Holmogory looks the very spot on which a poet of the 
people might be born. 
‘From Holmogory to Kargopol, from Kargopol to Viete- 
gra, we pass through an empire of villages, not a single 
place on a road four hundred miles in length that could 
by any form of courtesy be called a town. The track runs 
on and on, now winding by the river bank, now eating its 
way through the forest growths; but always flowing, as it 
were, in one thin line from north to south; ferrying deep 
rivers, dragging through shingle, slime, and peat ; crashing 
over broken rock ; and crawling up gentle heights. His 
horses four abreast, and lashed to the tarantass with ropes 
and chains, the driver tears along the road as though he 
were racing with his Chert—his Evil One; and all in the 
hope of getting from his thaukless fare an extra cup of tea. 
