How different is travelling now! In less than three days one may travel kfrom St. Petersburg to London. From St. Petersburg to Berlin one may travel with every comfort without once leaving the carriage, every convenience being provided. From Vienna to St. Petersburg I once travelled thus, changing carriages only at Warsaw, and at Wilna, where we joined the train from Berlin. During a year which my wife spent in Scotland, while I returned and remained in St. Petersburg, every interchange of letters cost 13s 6d, and occupied more than a fortnight, nearly three weeks in transmission. Now the postage of a letter is 2|d, and it is conveyed in four days, while a post card is transmitted and delivered for a penny!
POLAND,
CHAPTER I. ST. PETERSBURG TO POLAND.
IN journeying from St. Petersburg by railway towards Poland, for some 200 miles we pass over ground which is of a dead level, or almost such, being varied, not by rising grounds, but by marshes and bogs, the dry land being to some extent covered with trees of apparently no great age: a stranger would say trees of some twenty or thirty years growth; and I might say the same, but passing over the ground at distant periods, I have found them always apparently of the same age as they were when I first saw them; and this may be really the case, these having disappeared, and those now there being trees by which they have been replaced. They are apparently the scraggy representatives of extensive forests of a former day.
Nowhere are seen forests such as may be seen in travelling in the Governments of Olonetz and Archangel in Northern Russia, and of Moscow, Orel, and others in Central Russia.
Passing on, between Pskoff and Dunsburg, the country is found to present more of an undulating aspect; instead of stagnant waters, brooks and rivulets and other forms of running waters are seen. In this district great quantities of flax are grown; and the water is turned to account in preparing the produce for the market. There are two qualities of flax prepared, each in its own way, The one
ST. PETERSBURG TO POLAND. 13
of these, known as Motckenet*, is prepared by being steeped for some time, and dried, to facilitate the removal of the skin or bark, technically called silica, and other material from the long woody fibre of which flax consists; the other of these, called Slanetz> is bleached by exposure to rain and dew, or artificial sprinkling of water, and the sunshine. The former is white, the latter is dark in colour; and the latter frequently gives trouble to the merchant by heating through fermentation about the season at which the plant flowers.
At Kovno, about 200 miles beyond Dunsburg, we enter Poland, and advancing through the eastern portion of that country, the traveller remarks that agriculture appears to be carried on with more of a scientific character than in the lands through which he has been passing, both on the further and on the hither side of Dunsburg; the houses are more regularly built; the villages have more of a European aspect, but the houses resembling more those of Austria than those of Northern Germany, and the similarity may be traced also in the laying out of the fields: but by this one is reminded more of the arable lands of Bavaria and other countries of Southern Germany than of what is seen in Austria.
In North Germany the land is level, and there is no end of ditches or open drains. Here it is more undulating, and these are less frequent. Agriculture seems also to be more remunerative than in the lands traversed, the crops stand thicker in the ground, and surface draining appears to be uncalled for. The fields are sown with wheat, whereas to the north of Kovno, there were to be seen only barley, oats, and flax. All the more valuable cereals seem to flourish in Poland, and in passing through this district there is produced an impression that the soil is more productive than it is further to the north; that the climate must be more equable; and the superficial aspect of the land being more undulating, and at the same time more thickly wooded, that as an agricultural district it must be at least 50 per cent, superior to the Governments of St. Petersburg and of Pskoff.
In Poland both wheat and wool are raised for exportation. Large crops of potatoes are raised for the production of spirits by distillation, and beetroot for the manufacture of sugar; and wood for building purposes is exported largely. The Scots fir (Pinus sylvestris), and the oak ( Quercus robur), are of very superior quality.