In the morning he proceeded down the stream. Not caring to engage another crew, he floated with the current and shared with his Russian servant the labor of steering. The next night he was robbed again, and the robbers, angry at finding so little to steal, did not leave him his boat. After much difficulty he reached a native village and procured an old skiff. With this he finished his journey unmolested.
There were fifteen or twenty deck passengers, a fair proportion being women and children. Among the latter was a black eyed girl of fifteen, in a calico dress and wearing a shawl pinned around a pretty face. On Sunday morning she appeared in neat apparel and was evidently desirous of being seen. There were two old men dressed in coarse cloth of a ‘butternut’ hue, that reminded me of Arkansas and Tennessee. The morning we started one of them was seated on the deck counting a pile of copper coin with great care. Two, three, four times he told it off, piece by piece, and then folded it carefully in the corner of his kerchief. In all he had less than a rouble, but he preserved it as if it were a million.
CASH ACCOUNT.
The baggage of the deck passengers consisted of boxes and household furniture in general, not omitting the ever-present samovar. This baggage was piled on the deck and was the reclining place of its owners by day. In the night they had the privilege of the after cabin, where they slept on the seats and floor.
‘Wooding up’ was not performed with American alacrity. To bring the steamer to land she was anchored thirty feet from shore, and two men in a skiff carried a line to the bank and made it fast. With this line and the anchor the boat was warped within ten feet of the shore, another line keeping the stern in position. An ordinary plank a foot wide made the connection with the solid earth. These boats have no guards and cannot overhang the land like our Western craft. Wood was generally piled fifty, a hundred, or five hundred feet from the landing place, wherever most convenient to the owner. No one seems to think of placing it near the water’s edge as with us; they told me that this had been done formerly, and the freshets had carried the wood away. The peasants, warned by their loss, are determined to keep on the safe side.
When all was ready the deck hands went very leisurely to work. Each carried a piece of rope which he looped around a few sticks of wood as a boy secures his bundle of school books. The rope was then slung upon the shoulder, the wood hanging over the back of the carrier and occasionally coming loose from its fastenings. No man showed any sign of hurrying, but all acted as if there were nothing in the world as cheap as time. One day I watched the wooding operation from beginning to end. It took an hour and a half and twelve men to bring about four cords of wood on board. There was but one man displaying any activity, and he was falling from the plank into the river.
WOODING UP.
The Russian measure of wood is the sajene (fathom.) and a sajene of wood is a pile a fathom long, wide, and high. The Russian marine fathom measures six feet like our own, but the land fathom is seven feet. It is by the land fathom that everything on solid earth is measured. A stick seven feet long is somewhat inconvenient, and therefore they cut wood half a fathom in length.