y foot still unfit for active service, we order
a _telyayga_ (cart) and start anew for Imatra Foss. Our vehicle is
simply a wooden tray on wheels, with a bag of hay in it, on which we do
our best to recline, while our driver perches himself on the edge of the
cart, thereby doubtless realizing vividly the sensation of rowing hard
in a pair of thin unmentionables. Thanks to the perpetual gaps in the
road formed by the great thaw two months ago (the Finnish winter ending
about the beginning of May), during the greater part of the ride we
play an animated though involuntary game of cup-and-ball, being thrown
up and caught again incessantly. At length a dull roar, growing ever
louder and louder, breaks the dreamy stillness of the forest, and before
long we come to a little chalet-like inn embosomed in trees, where we
alight, for this is the "Imatra Hotel."

Let us cast one glance out of the back window before sitting down to
supper (in a long, bare, chilly chamber like a third-class
waiting-room), for such a view is not seen every day. We are on the very
brink of a deep narrow gorge, the upper part of which is so thickly clad
with pines as to resemble the crest of some gigantic helmet, but beneath
the naked granite stands out in all its grim barrenness, lashed by the
spray of the mighty torrent that roars between its projecting rocks.
Just below us, the river, forced back by a huge boulder in the centre of
its course, literally piles itself up into a kind of liquid mound,
foaming, flashing and trembling incessantly, the ceaseless motion and
tremendous din of the rapids having an indescribably bewildering effect.

On quitting our inn the next morning a very picturesque walk of half an
hour brings us to a little hut beside the Saima Ferry, where we find a
party of "three fishers" from St. Petersburg, comprising a Russian
colonel, an ex-chasseur d'Afrique (now an actor at one of the Russian
theatres) and an Englishman. The three give us a cordial welcome, and
insist upon our joining them; and for the next few days our surroundings
are savagely picturesque enough to satisfy Jean-Jacques himself--living
in a cabin of rough-hewn logs plastered with mud, sleeping on a bundle
of straw, with our knapsacks for a pillow; tramping for miles every day
through the sombre pine forest or fishing by moonlight in the shadowy
lake, with the silence of a newly-created world all around; and having
an "early pull" every morning across the ferry w