It must not, however, be supposed that, during this expedition, I was not exposed to much tribulation, in spite of the really very exact knowledge which I possessed of the manners and customs of the country. Sometimes an adventure would be almost comic: as when, one day, not far from this celebrated Kargopol, I asked for food at a hut, and received for answer that they had nothing but tolokno to offer me.
‘Well, let us have the tolokno,’ I said, rather pleased than otherwise to make the acquaintance of a national dish, which I had often heard of, but never seen. My confusion, however, became great when the mistress of the house set down before me a jug of water, a spoon, and a small earthen jar half full of a dry and blackish flour. How was that to be eaten? How could I fail to betray that I was a stranger by my crying ignorance of a dish so common in Russia? I began to talk, as if for my life, about any nonsense that would divert their attention; but my hostess was not to be diverted, and she asked me why I did not eat, since I was so hungry?
‘But perhaps you would like it better mixed with kvass (cider)?’
‘Oh yes, with cider,’ I replied, as much at a loss as before.
She brought some cider, and, luckily, poured it herself into the pot, stirring it with the spoon. The brown mass then swelled until it filled the jar, and made a paste, which I now knew how to eat. It was made of oats baked in an oven, which are then carefully sifted and pounded in meal, and, when mixed with water or cider it forms a substance so fairly palatable that I can recommend it especially to our brave highlanders of the Carpathians.
The district of Olonets is traversed in all directions by canals, formed to unite the different lakes and rivers of Onega, Ladoga, Vytiégra, Svir, &c.; and these form the principal means of communication between one place and another. For the preservation and inspection of these works, stations have been set down at different points, and these are constantly occupied by soldiers, the greater number of them being Poles, who have groaned under arms in the imperial service for the last sixteen years, that is to say, ever since 1831. From Archangel to Vytiégra I fell in with several of my unhappy countrymen, thus incorporated into military bodies, and generally found that, in spite of their long residence in the country, they spoke Russian very imperfectly. I often talked with them, pretending to be a native of Siberia, and thus drew from them an account of their sorrows. I remember, in particular, one sinister phrase which made me shudder. Hearing once the complaints made by a Pole of the hardships and fatigues of his life as a Russian soldier, I said to him what only a true Russian would have said:
‘But, after all, you are not so very much beaten?’
‘What! we are not beaten,’ was the retort, accompanied by an almost savage laugh; ‘you don’t think we are beaten? as if anybody got the Tzar’s bread to eat gratis!’
I frequently saw another sad sight in this country, namely, gangs (partyé) of Jewish children that were being driven to Archangel. It should be known that, whereas the Russian government in Poland only recruits among adult Christians, it takes boys of from ten to fifteen from the Jewish population, in order that, forgetting more perfectly their traditional religion and manners, they may become fit for military life, for which it seems that adult Israelites are not so well adapted. A great number of these young recruits are intended for the navy, and sent to the different ports of the White Sea, and, to me, the sight of these poor children, with their heads shaved, and wrapped in their little pelisses, was most pitiful; for the soldiers in charge of the gang drove them before them like a flock of sheep, and I was assured by the natives that many of them died by the way.
It was also in this department of Olonets that I saw another symptom of the moral state of Russia, which was in itself not less curious. I had gone into a cottage to ask my way; it was on the road from Kargopol to Vytiégra. I found in the hut an old man with a long white beard, and of respectable appearance, who, as soon as he began to talk to me, expressed such a hatred of the Tzar, the government, and the priests, that I had no difficulty in recognising in him a starovier, or old believer. Finding me to be a man well disposed to share his religious views, he ran on at great length, and finally shed tears over the persecution of the true faith. In order to prove to me that the manner of making the sign of the cross adopted ever since the reformation of Nicon (that is, the ordinary Russian fashion) was wholly heretical, he looked all round the outside of his house, locked the door, and, having taken an oath of secrecy from me, he drew from a hiding-place a little figure in copper, evidently a rough piece of old Byzantine workmanship, which certainly represented our Lord as giving the benediction with the two fore fingers of the right hand extended, as in the manner of the staroviertsi. ‘They force us,’ he continued, ‘to go to the tserkiev of the heretics, where the popes oblige us to make the sign of the cross in their own way; but when we come back from the tserkiev, we pray to the true God, and we ask Him to forgive the great sin.’ He afterwards drew from the same repository an old paper book, setting forth ‘The History of the Patriarch Joseph, as betrayed and sold by his Brethren.’ The good man proceeded to instruct me in these novelties, and shed some tears of emotion at the virtue of Joseph when tempted by the wife of Potiphar.