“No; if you intend to remain only a few days, it is not worth while to register them,” was the startling reply; and those wretched, unwieldy parchments remained in our possession, even after we had announced that we did not meditate departing for some time.  I hesitate to set down the whole truth about the anxiety they cost us for a while.  How many innocent officers, in crack regiments (as we discovered when we learned the uniforms), in search of a breakfast or a dinner, did we not take for the police upon our tracks, in search of those concealed documents!  Our excitement was ministered to by the Tatar waiters, who, not having knowledge of our nationality, mistook us for English people, and wrecked our nerves by making our tea as strong and black as beer, with a view to large “tea-money” for this delicate attention to our insular tastes.

If no one wanted those documents, what were we to do with them?  Wear them as breastplates (folded), or as garments (full size)?  No pocket of any sex would tolerate them, and we had been given to understand by veracious (?) travelers that it was as much as our lives were worth to be separated from them for a single moment.  At the end of a week we forced the hotel to take charge of them.  They were registered, and immediately thrown back on our hands.  Then we built lean-tos on our petticoats to hold them, and carried them about until they looked aged and crumpled and almost frayed, like ancestral parchments.  We even slept with them under our pillows.  At last we also were nearly worn out, and we tossed those Sindbad passports into a drawer, then into a trunk.  There they remained for three months; and when they were demanded, we had to undertake a serious search, so completely had their existence and whereabouts been lost to our lightened spirits.  In the mean time we had grasped the elementary fact that they would be required only on a change of domicile.  By dint of experience we learned various other facts, which I may as well summarize at once.

The legal price of registration is twenty kopeks (about ten cents), the value of the stamp.  But hotel and lodging-house keepers never set it down in one’s bill at less than double that amount.  It often rises to four or five times the legal charge, according to the elegance of the rooms which one occupies, and also according to the daring of the landlord.  In one house in Moscow, they even tried to make us pay again on leaving.  We refused, and as we already had possession of the passports, which, they pretended, required a second registry, they could do nothing.  This abuse of overcharging for passport registration on the part of landlords seems to have been general.  It became so serious that the Argus-eyed prefect of St. Petersburg, General Gresser (now deceased), issued an order that no more than the law allowed should be exacted from lodgers.  I presume, however, that all persons who could not read Russian, or who did not chance to notice this regulation, continued to contribute to the pockets of landlords, since human nature is very much alike everywhere, in certain professions.  I had no occasion to test the point personally, as the law was issued just previous to my departure from the country.