VI

On other nights heavy rain came on unexpectedly, and I discovered how pleasant a bed may be made just under the framework of a bridge.  The bridge is a favourite resort of the Russian tramp and pilgrim, and I have often come across their comfortable hay or bracken beds there.  Indeed I seldom go across a bridge at night without thinking there may be some such as myself beneath it.

When the weather is wet it is much more profitable to sleep in a village—­there is hospitality there, and the peasant wife gives you hot soup and dries your clothes.  But often villages are far apart, and when you are tramping through the forest there may be twenty miles without a human shelter.  I remember I found empty houses, and though I used them they were most fearsome.  I had more thrills in them than in the most lonely resting-places in the open.  Some distance from Gagri I found an old ruined dwelling, floorless, almost roofless, but still affording shelter.  I had many misgivings as I lay there.  Was the house haunted?  Was it some one else’s shelter?  Had some family lived there and all died out?  You may imagine the questions that assailed me, once I had lain down.  But whether evil was connected with the house or no, it was innocuous for me.  Nothing happened; only the moon looked through the open doorway; winds wandered among the broken rafters, and far away owls shrieked.

Again, on the way to Otchemchiri I came upon a beautiful cottage in the forest and went to ask hospitality, but found no one there.  The front door was bolted but the back door was open.  I walked in and took a seat.  As there were red-hot embers in the fire some one had lately been there, and would no doubt come back—­so I thought.  But no one came:  twilight grew to night in loneliness and I lay down on the long sleeping bench and slept.  It was like the house of the three bears but that there was no hot porridge on the table.  But no bears came; only next morning I was confronted by a half-dressed savage, a veritable Caliban by appearance but quite harmless, an idiot and deaf and dumb.  I made signs to him and he went out and brought in wood, and we remade the fire together.

I have slept out in many places—­in England, in the Caucasus where it was amongst the most lawless people in Europe, in North Russian forests where the bear is something to be reckoned with—­but I have never come to harm.  The most glorious and wonderful nights I ever had were almost sleepless ones, spent looking at the stars and tasting the new sensations.  Yet even in respect of rest it seems to me I have thriven better out of doors.  There is a real tranquillity on a mountain side after the sun has gone down, and a silence, even though the crickets whistle and owls cry, though the wind murmurs in the trees above or the waves on the shore below.  The noises in houses are often intolerable and one has to wait all every noise in the house and in the