Page:The Boy Travellers in the Russian Empire.djvu/67

Rh is 'dva-sto.' The other hundreds are formed in the same way to five hundred, which is 'pjat sot;' six hundred is 'shayst sot,' and the other hundreds go on the same way; one thousand is 'tis-syat-sha.' You can now go ahead with tens and hundreds of thousands up to a million, which is 'meel-yon'—very much like our own word for the same number. "It helps us greatly in getting around among the people without a guide. We can bargain with the drivers, make purchases in the shops, and do lots and lots of things which we could not if we didn't know how to count. Any boy or man who comes to Russia should learn to count while he is riding from the frontier to St. Petersburg, and if he takes our advice he will do so. He can find it all in Murray's or any other good guide-book, and he will also find there the most useful phrases for travelling purposes.

"In driving with the isvoshchiks, we have found them very obliging, and both Fred and I have been many times surprised at their intelligence when we remembered that very few of them were able to read or write their own language. When they find we are foreigners, and do not speak Russian, they do not jabber away like French or German drivers, or London cabbies, but confine themselves to a very few words. Take one we had to-day, for example: as he drove along he called our attention to the churches and other public buildings that we passed by, pronouncing the name of the building and nothing more. In this way we understood him; but if he had involved the name with a dozen or twenty other words we should have been in a perfect fog about it.

"In winter the drosky makes way for the sledge, which is the tiniest vehicle of the kind you can imagine. Two persons can crowd into a sledge, though there is really room for only one. Whether you are one or two, you sit with your face within ten or twelve inches of the driver's back, which forms almost the entire feature of your landscape. The sledges in winter are even more numerous than are the droskies in summer, as many persons ride then who do not do so when the weather is warm.

"Everybody rides in a Russian city in winter—at least everybody who claims to have much respect for himself; and in fact riding is so cheap that it must be a very shallow purse that cannot afford it. For a drive of a mile or less you pay eight or ten copecks (ten copecks equal eight cents), and you can ride a couple of miles for fifteen copecks, and sometimes for ten. By the hour you pay forty or fifty copecks; and if you make a bargain you can have the vehicle all to yourself a whole day for a dollar and a half, and sometimes less. They go very fast; and if your time is