ay and to make up for the slowness of the horses and bad
roads, I travelled sixteen and eighteen hours a day, and when I came to
a post station I was pretty tired.

The ploughs I now met were drawn by six horses and attended by four or
five men. The struggles of the poor animals as they sank continually in
the deep soft snow and tried to extricate themselves, were sometimes
painful to behold.

We always had to be careful to drive in the middle of the road, where
the snow had been cleared and packed by the snow-ploughs and the
rollers. Sometimes we could not tell where it was, for the land around
was deeply buried and the track of the snow-ploughs was hidden by the
fresh-fallen snow.

When my driver made a mistake and drove one way or the other outside of
the track, the first intimation we had was that of the horse sinking
suddenly, being ourselves upset or nearly so. Then we had a lot of
trouble putting him on the track again.

After several of these mishaps, the driver would say to me: "Now I am
going to let the horse go by himself. He is accustomed every year to go
in deep snow on this road and he will know the way." "You are right," I
would reply.

When let alone the horse would walk very slowly, and he would hesitate
each time he put either his right or his left foot on the snow, to make
sure he was on the right track. If he thought he was on the left of the
road, it was his left foot that came down first; if he thought he was to
the right of the road, he put his right foot down, but not until he had
made sure that he was right. If he saw that he had made a mistake, he
turned quickly to one side or the other.

One day the horse suddenly dropped one leg in the soft snow, on the
right side of the track; this unbalanced him and--bang! he fell on his
side, taking the sleigh with him. We were pitched out, and as we got up
on our legs we found ourselves in snow up to our necks. Only after
frantic efforts did the horse succeed in regaining his footing.

As I looked around and saw our situation, and that our three heads were
just above the snow, with the horse's head looking at us, his eyes
seeming to say, "Are you not going to help me out of this?" I gave a
great shout of laughter, for the sight was so funny that I forgot being
pitched out--and I said to the driver, "Don't we look funny, the horse
included, with only our heads and shoulders above the snow!"

What a job we had to extricate ourselves, put the poor h