For this purpose he was sent to Moscow, and apprenticed there to a carpenter.
After four years of apprenticeship he was able not only to earn his own bread, but to help the household in the payment of their taxes, and to pay annually to his master a fixed yearly sum--first ten, then twenty, then thirty, and ultimately, for some years immediately before the Emancipation, seventy roubles.

In return for this annual sum he was free to work and wander about as he pleased, and for some years he had made ample use of his conditional liberty.

I never succeeded in extracting from him a chronological account of his travels, but I could gather from his occasional remarks that he had wandered over a great part of European Russia.

Evidently he had been in his youth what is colloquially termed "a roving blade," and had by no means confined himself to the trade which he had learned during his four years of apprenticeship.

Once he had helped to navigate a raft from Vetluga to Astrakhan, a distance of about two thousand miles.