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Updated: June 11, 2025
In passing through the street to the coach, which was by this time furnished with fresh horses, I met the hostler, and would have caned him heartily; but perceiving my intention, he took to his heels and vanished. Of all the people I have ever seen, the hostlers, postilions, and other fellows hanging about the post-houses in Italy, are the most greedy, impertinent, and provoking.
My companions in the two post-coaches were very lively, being mainly French actors and actresses who had just finished their winter campaign in Russia; and, when we changed horses at the post-houses, the scenes were of a sort which an American orator once characterized as ``halcyon and vociferous.
"How the devil could any one have got so soon upon our track?" "Why, Idsleigh may have turned informer, in his own interest he was in a devilish difficult position and men would be sent with our descriptions to the post-houses. 'Tis merely possible. Or our hackney-coachman may have guessed something, and dogged me to the Strand, and informed.
I was always reminded of the state of affairs immediately after my arrival; for during the first years of my school life at Kottbus no one was permitted to enter the city without a paper proving identity, which was demanded by constables at the exits of railway stations or in the yards of post-houses.
The speed at which we travelled was wonderful, for at intervals of about forty miles were post-houses and at these, whatever might be the hour of day or night, we found fresh horses from the King's stud awaiting us.
The distance between the "Chapar khanehs," as the tumble-down sheds doing duty for post-houses are called, is generally five farsakhs, or about twenty English miles; but the Persian farsakh is elastic, and we often rode more, at other times less, than we paid for. Given a good horse and fine weather, Persian travel would be delightful; but the former is, unfortunately, very rarely met with.
Siberian horses are wiry little animals, not taking to the eye, but possessing speed and great endurance. The post-houses are situated from twelve to twenty-five versts apart, according to the difficulty of the country, a verst being about two-thirds of an English mile.
But at length we rumbled over a bridge, there was a sharp call back from our post-boy to him of the chaise behind, and then began that rocking and pitching and swaying and creaking, which was to last the whole night long, save for the brief stops at the post-houses.
It appears that on his conception of his Scythian expedition, he caused certain Post-houses to be erected on all the principal roads. These houses were a day's journey from each other; and Cyrus employed horsemen to convey the intelligence from the army to the first Post-house, and so to the second and third, till the end of the Post-houses, which was at Susa.
The peasants of this country, men in shirts and drawers of coarse linen, and women with braided hair hanging down under linen veils, stopped their carts as soon as a post-carriage rushed into sight, and bent almost to the earth. At post-houses the servants abased themselves to take me by the heel. In no other country was the spirit of man so broken.
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