FROM TULA 
246 
chap, in the frigid regions of the North, that we seemed 
X ' j suddenly transported to a different zone. 
Dediiof. The rapture, however, was not of long duration. 
It is impossible to imagine a place more mise- 
rable than the town or village of Dediiof, the 
first place of relay, distant only twenty 1 miles 
from Tula. It consisted of several timber huts, 
coarsely thatched with straw. The interstices 
of the trunks of trees, which, lying horizontally, 
formed the walls of the huts, were filled with 
mud. Dediiof stands in a wide and open district, 
one half of it being upon the top, and the other 
half near the bottom, of a hill. At first sight, it 
appears like a number of dunghills, or heaps - 
of straw; and it is only by a very near approach 
that the traveller can be convinced of it s being 
the residence of human beings; much less that 
it should figure in the Russian maps as a town. 
It is from seeing such places that we may con- 
ceive what sort of cities and towns afford the 
names which we find in the Russian Atlas, so 
profusely scattered over the eastern provinces 
of the empire 2 . The wretched state of Dediiof 
(1) Thirty versts. 
(2) “ Several of these towns arc even nothing more than so many 
stakes driven into the ground, containing their name, and delineating 
their site ; yet they figure in the map as if they were the capitals of so 
many provinces.*’ Secret Mem. of the Cflurt of Petersburg, p. 83. 
