The passport law seems to be interpreted by each man for himself in other respects, also.  In some places, we found that we could stay overnight quite informally; at others, our passports were required.  Once we spent an entire month incognito.  At Kazan, our balcony commanded a full view of the police department of registry, directly opposite.  The landlord sniffed disdainfully at the mention of our passports, and I am sure that we should not have been asked for them at all, had not one of the officials, who chanced to be less wilted by the intense heat than his fellows,—­they had been gazing lazily at us, singly and in battalions, in the intervals of their rigorous idleness, for the last four and twenty hours,—­suddenly taken a languid interest in us about one hour before our departure.  The landlord said he was “simply ridiculous.”  On another occasion, a waiter in a hotel recognized the Russians who were with us as neighbors of his former master in the days of serfdom.  He suggested that he would arrange not to have our passports called for at all, since they might be kept overtime, and our departure would thus be delayed, and we be incommoded.  Only one of our friends had even taken the trouble to bring a “document;” but the whole party spent three days under the protection of this ex-serf.  Of course, we bespoke his attendance for ourselves, and remembered that little circumstance in his “tea-money.”  This practice of detaining passports arbitrarily, from which the ex-serf was protecting us, prevails in some localities, judging from the uproar about it in the Russian newspapers.  It is contrary to the law, and can be resisted by travelers who have time, courage, and determination.  It appears to be a device of the landlords at watering places and summer resorts generally, who desire to detain guests.  I doubt whether the police have anything to do with it.  What we paid the ex-serf for was, practically, protection against his employer.

Our one experience of this device was coupled with a good deal of amusement, and initiated us into some of the laws of the Russian post-office as well.  To begin my story intelligibly, I must premise that no Russian could ever pronounce or spell our name correctly unaided.  A worse name to put on a Russian official document, with its H and its double o, never was invented!  There is no letter h in the Russian alphabet, and it is customary to supply the deficiency with the letter g, leaving the utterer to his fate as to which of the two legitimate sounds—­the foreign or the native—­he is to produce.  It affords a test of cultivation parallel to that involved in giving a man a knife and fork with a piece of pie, and observing which he uses.  That is the American shibboleth.  Lomonosoff, the famous founder of Russian literary language in the last century, wrote a long rhymed strophe, containing a mass of words in which the g occurs legitimately and illegitimately, and wound up by wailing out the query, “Who can emerge from the crucial test of pronouncing all these correctly, unimpeached?” That is the Russian shibboleth.