moBip JOURNEY DUE NOETH; 0f a in IN THE SUMMER OF 1856. BY GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA. SECOND EDITION. LONDON: RICHARD BEFTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET. 1859. LONDON : PRINTED BY W. CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET. " Forasmuche as it is necessarie for alle those who minde to take in hande y e travelle into farre and strange countreyes to endeavoure them- selves, not only to understaunde y orders, commodities, and fruitfullnesse thereof, but also to apply them to y e settynge forth of y e same, whereby e it may encourage others to y e like travaile ; therefore have I thoughte goode to make a briefe rehearsalle of y e order of this my travaile in Russia and Muscovia ; because it was my chaunce to fall in with y e northe-easte parts of Europe before I came to Muscovia, I will fuithfullye exercise my know- " T e Book of y e great and mighty Emperor of Russia, and Duke of Muscovia, and of y e dominions, orders, and com- modities thereunto belonging : drawen by Richard Chancel- lour: A.D. 1599." " And whereas (he saith) I have before made mention how Muscovia was in our time discovered by Richard Chaucellour, in his voyage toward Cathay, by y e direction and information of M. Sebastian Cabota, who long before this had this secret in his minde, it is meete to telle that y e same is largely and faithfully written in y e Latin tongue by that learned yong manne Clement Adams scolemaster to y e Queen's henshman, as he received it at y e mouth of y 6 said Richard Chancellour." " Y e New Navigation and Discoverie of y e Kingdom of Mus- covia by y e Northe-Easte, in y e year 1553 ; Enterprised by Sir Hugh Willoughbie, Knyghte, and performed by Richard Chancellour, Pilot-maior of y e voiage : A. D. 1559." 47594 CONTENTS. PAGE I. I BEGIN MY JOURNEY 1 II. I AM ABOAED THE PRUSSIAN EAGLE . . 34 III. I AM AT CRONSTADT . . . 55 IV. I PASS THE CUSTOM-HOUSE, AND TAKE MY FIRST RUSSIAN WALK . . . . . 78 V. ISCHVOSTCHIK ! THE DROSCHKY-DRIVER f .98 VI. THE DROSCHKY 109 VII. THE CZAR'S HIGHWAY. . . . .125 VIII. GOSTINNOI-DVOR. THE GREAT BAZAAR . 140 IX. CONCERNING BOOTS AND SHOES . . .163 X. THE SLOBODA. A RUSSIAN VILLAGE . . 175 XI. A COUNTRY HOUSE . .... 190 XII. RUSSIANS AT HOME . . . .214 xm. HEYDE'S 243 XIV. MY BED AND BOARD . 259 VI CONTENTS. PAGE XV. 1 SEE LIFE ...... 269 XVI. HIGH JINKS AT CHRISTOFFSKY . . . 281 XVII. THE GREAT RUSSIAN ' BOGEY' (THE POLICE) . 293 XVIII. MUSIC AND THE DRAMA . . . .325 XIX. TCHORNI NAROD : (THE BLACK PEOPLE) . . 340 XX. THE IKS 357 XXI. COMING HOME 372 L'ENVOI. ....... 376 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. L I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. * I THANK heaven,' I said, when I came to Erquellines, on the Belgian frontier, * that I have done, for some time at least, with the deplorable everyday humdrum state of civilisation in which I have been vegetating so long, and growing so rankly weedy. Not that I am about to forswear shaving, renounce pantaloons, or relinquish the use of a knife and fork at meal-times. I hope to wear clean linen for many successive days to come, and to keep myself au courant with the doings of London through the media of Galignani's Messenger, and the Illustrated Times and News (thrice blessed be both those travellers' joys !). Nay, railways shall penetrate whither I am going, mixed pickles be sold wholesale and retail, and pale ale be attainable at a more or less exorbitant price. I am not bound for the Ethiopio-Christian empire of Prester John ; I am not about to sail for the island of Barataria ; my passport is not made out for the kingdom of Utopia (would that it were !) ; I cannot hope, in my journeyings, to see either the Yang-tse-Kiang, or the sources of the Nile, or the Mountains of the Moon. I am going, it is true, to t'other side of Jordan, which somewhat vague (and American) geographical definition may mean the other side of the Straits of Dover, or the Grecian 2 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. Archipelago, or the Great Belt, or the Pacific Ocean. But, wherever I go, civilisation will follow me. For I am of the Streets, and streety eis ten polin is my haven. Like the starling, I can't get out of cities ; if I journey sixteen hundred miles but I said that far away from Erquel lines and the Belgian frontier it will be but to another city another tumour of streets and houses and jostling crowds ; where from my windows I shall see a post, and wires stretching from it,' the extreme end of which I know to be in Loth- . bury, London. I am not so wisely foolish as to imagine, or to declare, that there is nothing new under the sun ; only the par- ticular ray of sunlight that illumines me in my state of life has fallen upon me so long, and dwells on me with such a persistent sameness, bright as it be, that I am dazed, and sun-sick ; and, when I shut my eyes, have but one green star before me, which obstinately refuses to assume the kaleidoscopic changes I delight in. I must go away, I said. I must rub this rust of soul and body off. I must have a change of grass. I want strange dishes to disagree with me. I want to be scorched or frozen in another latitude. I want to learn another alphabet ; to conjugate verbs in another fashion ; to be happy or miserable from other circumstances than those that gladden or sorrow me now. If I could be hard up, for instance, on the Bridge of Sighs, or wist- fully eyeing my last real at the Puerta del Sol ; if I could be sued on a bill drawn in the Sanskrit character, or be threatened with arrest by a Mahometan hatti- sheriff's-officer ; if I could incur perdition through not believing in the seven incarnations of Vishnu, instead of the thirty-nine Articles ; if I could be importuned for copy by the editor of the Mofussilite, and not the Morning Meteor ; if I could have the plague, or the vomito nero 9 or the plica polonica, instead of the English headache and blues, the change would be advantageous I 13EGIX MY JOURNEY. 3 salutary, I think. I am sure I should be much better off if I could change my own name, and forget my ownself for a time. But oh ! civilisation and Foreign Office passport system George William Frederick Earl of Clarendon, Baron Hyde of Hindon,* won't hear of that. I have made up my mind to change ; I am determined, I said, to depart out of this kingdom ; but the Earl and Baron insists on stamping, and num- bering, and registering me (all for the small sum of seven and sixpence) before I go. George William Frederick pounces upon me as a British subject travel- ling abroad ; asserts himself, his stars and garters, at great length, all over a sheet of blue foolscap paper, affectionately entreats all authorities, civil and military, to render me aid and assistance whenever I stand in need of them (I should like to catch the authorities doing anything of the sort !), and sends me abroad with the royal arms, his own, and a five-shilling receipt "stamp tacked to me, like a bird with a string tied to its leg. I am bound on a stern, long, cruel, rigid journey, far, far away, to the extreme right-hand top corner of the map of Europe but first Due North. And here I am at Erquellines on the frontier of the kingdom of Belgium ; and this is why I thanked heaven I was here. Not very far northward is Erquellines ; and yet I felt as if I had passed the Rubicon, when a parti-coloured sentry-box, the counterfeit presentment of the peculiarly sheepish-looking Belgian lion sitting on his hind-legs, with the legend " Union is strength " (and, indeed, I think it would take a good many of these lions to make a strong one), and a posse of custom-house officers kindly, but pudding-headed in appearance told me that I was in the Royaume de Belgique. I am, under ordinary travelling circumstances, ex- ceedingly fond of the compact little kingdom of King * Now superseded by the august Harris Earl of Malmesbury. B 2 4 " A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. Leopold. I look upon it as a fat, sensible, easy-going, respectable, happy-go-lucky sort of country. Very many pleasant days and hours have its quaint, quiet cities, its roomy farm-houses, its picture galleries, and sleepy canal boats, its beer and tobacco afforded me. I can- not join in the patriotic enthusiasm about ' les braves Beiges, because I consider the Belgians a sensible people to be the very reverse of valiant ; neither can 1 sympathise much with the archaeological public-spirit- edness of those Belgian savants who are anxious to restore the Flemish language to its primeval richness and purity, and have published the romance of Reynard the Fox in the original Low Dutch. As I think it to be the most hideous dialect in Europe, I would rather they had let it be. And to say the truth, I anf rather tired of hearing about the Duke of Alva, and Counts of Egmont and Horn though both worthy men in their way, doubtless whose decollation, and be- haviour prior to and following that ceremony, the Belgian painters have a mania for representing, only second to our abhorred Finding-of-the-Body-of-Harold- omania. And specially do 1 object to, and protest against, in Belgium, the Field of Waterloo and all appertaining thereto ; the knavish livery-stable keepers in 'Brussels, who swindle you if you take a conveyance to the field ; the beggars on the road ; the magnified dustheap with the abashed poodle fumbling with a ball of worsted on the summit, and called the Mountain of the Lion ; the semi-disforested forest of Soignies ; the indifferent outhouse called the farm of Hougoumont, and the Voice from Waterloo, by the deceased Sergeant-Major Cotton. But I love Belgium, never- theless as did Julius Caesar. Antwerp though the multiplicity of Rubenses give me almost as much of a surfeit as a month's apprenticeship in a pastrycook's shop would do Antwerp is my delight : I can wander for hours in that marvellous amalgam of the Alhambra, I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 5 the Crystal Palace, and a Flemish mansion the Exchange ;* and on the port . I fancy myself now in Cadiz, now in Venice, now in some old English seaport of the middle ages. Of Brussels it behoves me to speak, briefly, and with reticence, for that charming, spark- ling, lively, genial, warm-hearted little capital holds the very next place in my affections to Paris the beloved. Yet I stay only as many hours in Brussels, as, were I on anot'her errand, I should stay days. Due North is my destination, so I go to Liege. I can't help gazing, till I am satiated at the wondrous panorama that stretches out before me as we descend the four or five hundred feet gradient of descent that leads into the valley of the Meuse ; and as the train slides down the precipitous and almost fearful, inclined plane, I drink in all the marvels of the scene, enhanced as they are by the golden evening sunlight. I watch the domes and cupolas and quaint church spires, and even the factory chimneys, glorified into Oriental minarets by the delusive rays of the setting sun. Much should I like to alight at Liege, and seeking my inn take my rest there ; but an inward voice tells me that I have no business in Liege, that still Due North is my irre- vocable route ; and so I let the train go on its rattling roaring route, and compose myself to sleep till it shall carry me at its gruff will and pleasure over the frontier of Prussia. So ! at last at Herbesthal, and beneath the sway of the Belgian lion's harmless tail no longer. I am testy and drowsy, and feel half inclined to resent, as a personal affront, the proceedings of a tall individual cloaked, moustachioed, and helmeted, who appears Banshee-like at the carriage-window, pokes a lantern in my face, and, in the Teutonic tongue, demands my passport. I re- member, however, with timely resignation, that I am going Due North, to the dominions of Ursa Major, the * Now Ausgebrandt, burnt. 6 A JOURNEY DUE KORTH. great Panjandrum of passports, and that I am as yet but a very young bear, indeed, with all my passport-troubles to come ; so I give the Baron Hyde of Hindon's letter of recommendation to the man in the helmet, and fall into an uneasy sleep again. I hope it may do him good ! Was it at Liege or Pepinstern on the Spa Road (how different from that other Spa-Road Station, I know, on the Greenwich Railway, where attic-windows blink at the locomotive as it rushes by, and endless perspectives of ill-ventilated brick lanes and fluttering clothes-lines tell of the ugly neighbourhood where outlying tanners dwell, and railway stokers live when they are at home ; whereas this Spa Road is a deli- cious little gorge between purple under-wooded hills, with gaily-painted cottages, and peasant-women in red petticoats, and little saints in sentry-boxes by the way- side, and along which I see ladies on horseback, and moustachioed cavaliers careering towards Spa, one of the most charming little watering-places in Europe) ; at which station was it, I wonder, that we changed the lumbering, roomy, drab-lined nrst-class carriages of the French Nord, with their sheep-skin rugs, and zinc hot-water boxes, for these spruce, glistening, coquettish carriages, so daintily furbished out with morocco leather, and plate-glass, and varnished mahogany (when will English railway-travellers be emancipated from the villanous, flea-bitten pig-boxes, first, second, and third class, into which, after paying exorbitant fares they are thrust) when was it that an imperceptible fluffiness, and to albino tendency of hat, a shininess of cap-peaks, an eccentricity of boot-tips, a braidiness of coats, a prevalence of embroidered travelling-pouches, a greenness of veils, a twinkling of spectacles, a blond- ness of beards, a gaudiness of umbrellas, arid a guttural- ness of accent, together with the bold and sudden repudiation of the doctrine that tobacco-smoking on railways is prohibited, and must only be furtively I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 7 indulged in (the major part of the smoke finding its way up the coat-sleeve), with the reluctantly extorted consent of the young ladies who have nerves, and the pettish old gentlemen, and, above all, a wavering, mysterious, but potent smell, a drowsy compound of the odours of pomatum, sauerkraut, gas-meters, and stale tobacco-smoke, told me that I had crossed another frontier, and that I was in GERMANY? The train being once more in motion on its way (south this time) towards Cologne, 1 perused my passport by the light of the carriage lamp, and saw- where its virgin blueness had been sullied by the first patch of printing ink, scrawled writing, and sand, forming a visa. The Black Eagle of Prussia had been good enough to flap his wings for the first time on George William Frederick's talisman. He was good for a flight to Koln or Cologne ; but he was dated from Aachen, which Aachen I have just left, and which, bless me ! where were my eyes and memory ? must have been Aix-la-Chapelle. I consider it to have been an exceedingly lucky circumstance for the reader of this book that I, the Digressor, did not arrive at the City of Cologne on the Rhine till half-past eleven o'clock at night ; that it was pitch dark, and raining heavily ; that entering a cab I caused myself to be driven * right away ' over the bridge of boats to the Hotel Doopeepel, in the suburbs of Deutz ; that, being dog-tired, I went immediately to bed, and that I left. Cologne for Berlin by the first train at six a.m. the next morning. I consider this lucky for the reader, because if I had had any time to wander about the streets of Cologne, I should infallibly have launched into dissertations on the cathedral, the market-women, the aforesaid bridge of boats, the horrifying smells, the quaint houses, Jean Marie Farina, and who knows ! the Three Kings and the Eleven Thousand Virgins. 8 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. Under existing circumstances, all I at present have to say of the place is, that the landlord of the Grand Hotel Doopeepel, at Deutz, deserves a civic crown, or a large gold medal, or a sword of honour at all events he ought to have his deserts ; and I should like to have the task of giving him what he deserves, for the skill and ingenuity displayed in making my bill for a night's- lodging, and some trifling refreshment, amount to five Prussian dollars, or fifteen shillings sterling. The best or the worst of it was, that I couJd not dispute any of the items. I had certainly had them all. Bed, wax. lights, attendance, coffee, thimbleful of brandy, cigar, loaf of bread like a hardened muffin, couple of boiled eggs ; but oh, in such infinitesimal quantities ! As for the eggs, they might have been laid by a humming- bird. The demand of the bill was prodigious, the supply marvellously small, but I paid it admiringly, as one would pay to see a child with two heads, or a bearded lady. There is a difference of opinion among travelling sages, as to whether a man ought under any circum- stances to travel first-class by rail in Germany. The first-class carriages are luxurious nay, even splendid vehicles, softly padded, lined with crimson velvet, and extensively decorated with silken fringes and curtains. Again, the second-class carriages are also lined and padded, and are at least seventy-five per cent, more comfortable than our best English first-class carriages. Moreover, in the second-class, there are but two com- partments to a seat for four persons, so that, if the carriage be not full, you may recline at full length on the cushions, which, in night-travelling, is very com- fortable, and rejoices you much ; but then the reverse to this medal is, that German second-class carriages- are nearly invariably full to the window-sill. The Germans themselves repudiate the first-class stoutly, and it has passed into a Viator's proverb, that none I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. but 4 princes, Englishmen, and fools, travel by the first-class/ I have no particular affection for English- men abroad, but I like the company of Princes, and you may often have worse travelling companions than Fools ; so I travel, when I can afford it, first-class. There are other temptations thereto. The carriage is- seldom more than half- full, if that ; and you may change your place when you list, which, in a dragging journey of three hundred and fifty miles or so, is a privilege of no small moment ; and you have plenty of side-room for your rugs, and your books, and your carpet-bags. Then, again, there are but six passengers to a carriage instead of eight ; and again, besides the possible proximity of his Effulgency the reigning Grand Duke of Gumpetpelskirchen-Herrenbonen, the Englishman and the fool, you may have as a travelling com- panion a Lady, young, pretty, tastefully dressed, and adorably affable, as the triumphant majority of German ladies (bless them !) are ; and this lady will smile at your mistakes in German, but without wounding your amour propre, and will teach you more of that hard- mouthed language viva voce in ten minutes than you would learn in a month from a grammar and vocabulary, or from university-professor Doctor Schin- kelstrumpfs two-thaler lessons. And this lady (whom you long immediately to call ' du,' and fall on your knees in the carriage before) will ask you questions about the barbarous country you inhabit, and explain to you the use and meaning of common things, such as windmills, milestones, electric-telegraph posts, brick kilns, and the like, with a naivete and simple-minded- ness, deliriously delightful to contemplate ; she will give you little meat-pies and sweet cakes to eat from her own amply-stored bags; she will even if you are very agreeable and well-behaved allow you to comfort yourself outwardly with a dash of eau-de-Cologne from a silver-mounted phial, and inwardly with a sip from a 10 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. wicker-covered flask containing a liquid whose nature it is no business of yours to inquire ; she will sing you little German leider in a silvery voice, and cut the leaves of your book with an imitation poniard ; and all this she will do with such an unaffected kindness and simple dignity that the traveller who would presume upon them or be rude to her, must be a doubly-distilled brute and Pig, and only fit to travel in the last truck of an Eastern Counties fish-train, or to take care of the blind monkeys in the Zoological Gardens. And all good spirits bless and multiply the fair ladies of Germany ! They never object to smoking. There are certain carriages 'fur Damen' into which the men creatures are not allowed to penetrate, and from which tobacco smoke is, as a rule, excluded, though it is difficult enough to banish the exhalations from the neighbouring carriages ; but the ladies seldom (the nice ones never) patronise the carriages especially affected to their use. They just take railway potluck with the ruder sex ; and as for smoking cigar-smoking be it always understood they like it ; they delight in it, elles en raffolent. They know, sagacious creatures ! that a traveller with a cigar in his mouth is twice a Man ; that the fumes of the fragrant Havannah loosen the tongue, and open the heart, and dispel awkwardness and diffidence ; that he who wants to smoke, and is prevented from smoking, always feels aggrieved and oppressed, and is correspondingly sulky, disobliging, and morose. The only drawback to the society of the German lady in the railway carriage is this : that when she alights at a station, and in her handbell-toned voice bids you adieu and bon voyage sometimes pronounced 'pon foyache* there are always waiting on the plat- form for her other ladies young and pretty as herself, or else moustachioed relations (I hope they are re- lations), who fall to, kissing her, and pressing both her hands, till you are thrown into despair, and howl I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 11 with rage in your crimson-velvet prisoners' van. Then the train rolls away, and you feel that there is a nature-abhorred vacuum in the left-hand corner of your waistcoat, and that Fraulein von Name Unknown has taken your heart away .with her, and is now, probably, hanging it over her chimney-piece as a trophy, as an Indian chief suspends the scalps of his enemies to the poles of his hunting-lodge. On this present Due-Northern journey I must confess I did not lose my heart, for we were ladyless all the way ; but the average first-class travelling companions I had. There was a Prince- so at least I conjectured the asthmatic old gentleman who left us at Diisseldorf to be ; for who but a Prince could have possessed such a multiplicity of particoloured ribbons belonging to as many orders (a little soap and water would have done them a world of good) pinned on the breast of his brown surtout,* so much fragrant snuft' on his embroidered jabot, and such an impenetrably wise and aristocratic face ? Yes, he must have been a Prince, with seventy- five quarterings at least on his 'scutcheon. Then there was an Englishman (besides your humble servant), and there was a Fool. Such a fool ! Insipiem serenis- simm, and seriously unconscious of his folly. He was a Frenchman, fat, fair, self-complacent, and smiling, with some worsted-work embroidery on his head for a couvre-chef like a kettle-holder pinned into a circular form. There were mediaeval letters worked on it, and on which I tried hard to read 4 Polly put the kettle on/ but could not. He was going to Dresden, where he was to stay a week, and exhibited to us every ten minutes or so a letter of credit on a banker there, and asked us if we thought four thousand * Save Marshal Castellane, Commandant of the Army of Lyons, of course, whose breast is a perfect dyers-pole of glory. They say that the veteran Marshal cannot bear to be separated for an instant from his beloved stars and crosses ; and that even when he bathes, the insignia of his various orders, neatly painted on block tin, are suspended round his neck in the water. 12 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. florins would be enough to last him during his sojourn. He was as profoundly, carelessly, gaily, contentedly ignorant of things which the merest travelling tyro is usually conversant with, as a Frenchman could well be ; but he knew all about the Boulevard des Italiens, and that was quite enough for him. He laughed and talked incessantly ; but, like the jolly young waterman, it was about nothing at all. He could not smoke : it gave him a pain in his limbs, he said; but he liked much to witness the operation. Like most fools, he had a Fixed Idea ; and this fixed idea happened to be a most ex- cellent one being no other than this, that the German beer was very good (so it is, comparatively, after the Strasbourg and Biere de Mars abominations), and that it was desirable to drink as much of it as could pos- sibly be obtained. He alighted at every station, to drink a draught of creaming though mawkish beverage, and seemed deeply mortified when the train did not stop long enough for him to make a journey to the buffet, and half inclined to quarrel with me when I persuaded him to take a petit verre of cognac at Minden, as a corrective to the malt. But he was an hospitable and liberal simpleton, and when we, our- selves, declined to alight, he would come with a beaming countenance and a Torn-fool's joke to the carriage window, holding a great foaming glass tankard, with a pewter cover, of Bock Bier, or else a bottle of it to last to the next station. I am not ashamed to say that I drank his health several times between Diisseldorf and Hanover, and, what is more, wished him good health with all my heart. The German railway buffets are capital places of ' restoration ;' true oases in the great desert of cuttings and embankments. The fare is plentiful, varied, and cheap cheap, that is to say, if you received anything like Christian money in change for the napoleons or live-franc pieces your money-changer gave for that blessed bank note signed ' J. Ferraby,' in the Palais I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 13 Royal at Paris; but what intensity of disgustful re- probation can be sufficient to characterise the vile dross that is forced upon you, the debased fiddlers* money, that you are ashamed to put in your purse, and half inclined to fling out of the window : the poverty- stricken, clipped, measly, pockmarked, greasy, slimy silbergroschen, neuegroschen, grosgroschen, and gude- groschen (the eulogistic adjectives silver, new, big, good, to these leprous testoons all breathe the bitterest satire). A German refreshment-room is a receptacle for all the lame, halt, and blind coins of the Zollverein, the monetary refuse of Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, Austria, Hanover, Mecklenburg, and the infinite variety of smaller tinpot states ; nay, you are very lucky if the waiters do not contrive to give you a sprinkling of Hamburg and Lubeck money, with a few Copenhagen schillings, and Schleswig-Holstein marks. The rogues know that you have no time to question or dispute ; they take care not to give you your change till the starting-bell rings ; and by the time you have counted the abominable heap of marine- store money, and have got over your first outbursts of passion, you are half-a-dozen miles away. As a climax of villany, the change they give you at one station is not current, or is said not to be so, at the next. Say, waiter at Bienenbuttel, is not this the case ? And didst thou not contumeliously refuse my Prussian piece of ten groschen ? Why should it be that in England, the great market of the world, amply provisioned as it is, and with its unrivalled facilities of communication, refresh- ment-rooms not only on railways, but in theatres^ gardens, and other places of amusement should be so scantily and poorly furnished, and at such extortionate prices ? Why should our hunger be mocked by those dried-up Dead Sea fruits, those cheesecakes that seem to contain nothing but sawdust, those sandwiches re- sembling thin planks of wood with a stratum of dried 14 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. glue between them, those three-weeks-old pork and veal pies, all over bumps full of delusive promise, but containing nothing but little cubes of tough gristle and antediluvian fat ; those bygone buns with the hard, cracked, varnish-like veneering ; that hopeless cherry- brandy, with the one attenuated little cherry bobbing about in the vase like a shrivelled black buoy ; that flatulent lemonade tasting of the cork and the wire and of the carbonic acid gas, but of the lemon, never ; that bottled brown stout like so much bottled soapsuds ; that scalding infusion of birch-broom, miscalled tea; and that unsavoury compound of warm plate-washings, facetiously christened soup ? Why should English rail- way travellers be starved as well as smashed? Sir Francis Head tells us that they keep pigs at Wol- verton, which, in course of time, are promoted into pork pies ; but the promotion must surely go by se- niority. Look, for comparison, at the French buffets, with the savoury soup always ready; the sparkling little carafons of wine, the convenient cotelette, the tempting slices of pdte-de-foie gras, the crisp fresh loaves of bread, and all at really moderate prices. Look again at the German refreshment-rooms. That practical people (though they do indulge in smoking and metaphysics to such an extent) have a system of refreshment ca-lled c thumb restauration.' This consists of the famous butterbrod, or compact little crust of bread and butter on which is laid ham, cold meat, poultry, game, dried salmon, or caviare ! The first sight of that glistening black condiment startled me, and made me feel Due North more than ever. Minden, Hanover, Brunswick, have been passed. The armorial white horse made his appearance at the second of these places on the coinage of the poor blind king, and on a flaring escutcheon in front of the railway terminus. At Brunswick there was a fete in honour of the twenty-somethingth of the anniversary of the accession of the reigning duke, which I suppose I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 15 must be a source of great annual satisfaction to the sovereign in question, as well as to that other duke who doesn't reign but lives in Paris, paints his cheeks, wears the big diamonds, has an arsenal round his bedstead, and a mint of money underneath it, and is such a particular friend of the heaven-sent emperor Napoleon the Third. The terminus was plentifully decorated with evergreens and banners; there was a great deal of dust and music and beer-drinking going on (the chief ingredients, with smoking, of a German fete), and the platform was crowded with Bruns- wickers in holiday attire : beaux and belles in Teutonic- Parisian trim, and ruddy, straw-haired and straw- hatted country folk in resplendent gala-dresses. To give you a notion of the appearance of the more youthful female Brunswickers, I must recal to your remembrance the probable appearance of the little old woman, who, going to market, inadvertently fell asleep by the king's highway, and with whose garments such unwarrantable liberties were taken by a wretch by the name of Stout, a tinker by profession. The peasant girls of Bruns- wick look as the little old woman must have looked when she awoke from her nap ; so brief are their skirts, and so apparently unrecognised among them is the use of the subfusk garments christened by our prudish female cousins on the other side of the Atlantic ' pantalettes ;' but they wear variegated hose with em- broidered clocks, and their mothers have bidden them, as the song says, ' bind their hair with bands of rosy hue, and tie up their sleeves with ribbons rare, and lace their boddice blue,' and Lubin, happily, is not far away, but close at hand, and very pretty couples they make with their yellow hair tied in two ribboned tails behind. Mingling with the throng too, I see some soldiers I have been anxious, for many a long year, to be on visual terms with soldiers clad all in sable, with nodding black plumes, bugle ornaments to their 16 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. uniforms, and death's-heads and cross-bones on their shakoes. These are the renowned Black Brunswickers ; and I am strangely reminded, looking at them, of him that sate in the windowed niche of the high hall, alone, cheerless, brooding, thinking only of the bloody bier of his father, and of revenge : of that valiant chieftain of the Black Brunswickers who left the Duchess of Richmond's ball to die at Quatre Bras. I wish the Germans wouldn't call Brunswick Braun- schweig ; it destroys the illusion. I can't think of the illustrious house that has given a dynasty to the British throne as the House of Braunschweig. It is as caca- phonous in sound as would be the house of Physic- bottles, instead of the house of Medici, but our Teuton friends seem to have a genius for uglifying high-sound- ing names. They call Elsinore (Hamlet's Elsinore) Helsingborg ; Vienna, Wien ; Munich, Miinchen ; Cologne, Koln, and the Crimea, Krim. Can there be anything noble, proper to a famous battle-field where the bones of heroes lie whitening, in the word Krim ? The Frenchman, who was a fool, left us at the Prussian fortress town of Magdebourg, where the Englishman (who was anything but a fool, a thorough man of the world) also bade me adieu at this station. Then I was left alone in my glory to ponder over the historical places I had been hurried through since six o'clock that morning ; I thought of Dusseldorf, and Overbeck the painter, of the battle of Minden, and the Duke of Cumberland and Lord George Sackville ; of Hanover, George the First and his bad oysters ; of Magdebourg and Baron Trenck, till I went to sleep, and waking, found myself at Potsdam. I found that I had another travelling companion here in the person of a magnificent Incarnation, all ringleted, oiled, scented, dress-coated, and watered- silk faced, braided, frogged, ringed, jewelled, patent- leathered, amber-headed sticked, and straw-coloured I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 17 kid-gloved, who had travelled in the same train, from Cologne, but had been driven out of the adjoining carriage, he said by the execrable fumes of the Ger- man cigars, and now was good enough to tolerate me, owing to a mild and undeniably Havannah cigar I had lighted. This magnificent creature shone like a me- teor in the narrow carriage. The lamp mirrored itself in his glistening equipment ; his gloves and boots fitted so tightly, that you felt inclined to "think that he had varnished his hands straw-colour, and his feet black. There was not a crease in his fine linen, a speck of dust on his superfine Saxony sables, his waxed-moustachioes and glossy ringlets. I felt ashamed, embaled as I was in rugs and spatterdashes, and a fur cap, and a courier's pouch, all dusty and travel-stained, when I contemplated this bandbox voy- ageur, so spruce and kempt, the only sign of whose being away from home, was a magnificent mantle lined with expensive furs, on the seat beside him, and who yet, he told me, had been travelling incessantly for six days. He talked with incessant volubility in the French and English tongues ; the former seemed to be his native one : he knew everybody and everything I knew ; he had started the journal from which I was accredited, and was the promoter of the club of which I was an unworthy member; and as to myself he knew me intimately, so he said, though may I have six years' penal servitude with Lieutenant Austin late of Bir- mingham jail as Hulk Inspector if I had ever spoken to him before in my life ; and a great many things and people I did not know. He seemed personally acquainted with every musical instrument and musi- cian, from the piper that played before Moses to the Messrs. Distin and their Saxhorns. I began to fancy as he proceeded, that he must be that renowned and eccentric horn-player and mystificateur, who travels about Europe, Asia, Africa, America, Australia, and 18 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. other parts of the world, accompanied by a white game-cock, and who was once mistaken for a magician by the Greeks of Syra through his marvellous feat of blowing soap-bubbles with tobacco smoke inside them. I was in error, however. I learnt the wondrous crea- ture's name before I reached Berlin ; but although he refrained from binding me to secrecy, this is not the time nor place in which to reveal it. Ten thirty p.m., a wild sweep through a sandy plain thinly starred with lights ; then thickening masses of liuman habitations ; then brighter coruscations of gas- lamps, and Berlin. Here I am received with all the honours of war. Two grim guards with gleaming bayonets, on the platform, impress me, if they do not awe me, as the carriage-door is flung open ; and a very tall and fierce police-officer in a helmet demands my passport. I observe that the continental governments always keep the policemen with the longest mous- tachioes, the largest bodies, and the most ferocious general aspect, at the frontier towns and railway termini. You always see the elite of the municipal force, the prize policemen, when you enter a foreign country, and those in power have a decided eye to effect. Behold me here, exactly half way in my expedition Due North which is not due north by- the-by, but rather north-east. Post-haste to Berlin, and half my journey accom- plished. Now, when the northern end looms in sight, I find myself brought to a standstill. This is the twenty- seventh of April, and the flowers in England must be looking out their summer suits, yet here I am literally frozen-up. It was my design, on quitting London, to proceed, via Berlin, to Stettin in Pomerania, and there to take the first steamer to St. Petersburg. Here is my fare, sixty-two dollars in greasy Prussian notes like curl-papers smoothed out here is my Foreign-Office passport, not vise yet for Russia, but which to-morrow I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 19 will be ; here are my brains and my heart, bounding, yearning, for Muscovite impressions ; and there, at Stettin-on-the-Oder, is the Post-Dampfschiff Preus- sischer-Adler^ or Fast Mail-packet Prussian Eagle. What prevents the combination of these tilings carry ing me right away to Cronstadt? What but my being frozen up? What but the ice in the Gulf of Finland ? In a murky office in Mark Lane, London, where I first made my inquiries into Muscovite matters, the clerks spoke hopefully of the northern navigation being perfectly free by the end of April. In Brussels, weather-wise men, bound Russia- wards, were quite sanguine as to the first day of May being first open water. But in Berlin, people began to shake their heads, and whisper ugly stories about the ice ; and many advised me to take a run down to Leipzig and Dresden, and see the Saxon Switzerland; telling me significantly that I would have ample time to explore all central Germany before the northern waters were ruffled by the keel even of a cock-boat. There was a little band of Britons purposing for Petersburg at the table d'hote of the Hotel de Russie, at Berlin, of whom I had the advantage to make one ; and we fed ourselves from day to ua) (after dinner) with fallacious hopes of early steamers A Roman citizen in a buff waistcoat, and extensively interested in tallow (so at least it was whispered, though the Fremden Blatt said merely Shortsix, Kaufmann aus England, and was silent as to his speciality), was perfectly certain that a steamboat would start irom Stockholm for Cronstadt on the fourth of May, and he expressed his determi- nation to secure a passage by her ; but as Sweden hap- pens to be on the other side of the Baltic, and there was no bridge, and no water communication yet opened therewith, the Stockholm steamer was a thing to be looked at (in lithography, framed and glazed in the hall of the hotel; and longed for, rather than embarked C2 20 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. in. We were all of us perpetually haunted by a sort of phantom steamer a very flying Russian com- manded, I presume, by Captain Vanderdeckenovitch, whose departure some one had seen advertised in an. unknown newspaper. This spectral craft was reported to have left Hull some time since we all agreed that the passage-money out was nine guineas, inclusive of provisions of the very best quality, but exclusive of wines, liquors, and the steward's fee, and she was to- call (after doubling the Cape, I presume) at Kiel, Lu- beck, Copenhagen, Konigsberg, Jerusalem, Mada- gascar, and ' North and South Amerikee,' for aught I know. To find this ghostly bark, an impetuous Eng- lishman a north countryman with a head so fiery in hue that they might have put him on a post and made a lighthouse of him, and pendant whiskers like carriage rugs started off by the midnight mail to Hamburg. He came back in three days and a tower- ing rage, saying that there was ice even in the Elbe, and giving us to understand that the free cities of Hamburg, Lubeck, and Bremen, had concurred in laughing him to scorn at the bare mention of a steamer due north yet awhile at least. By degrees a grim certainty broke upon us, and settled itself convincingly in our minds. To the complexion of the Preussischer- Adler we must come ; and that Post-Dampfschiff would start from Stettin on Saturday, the seventeenth of May at noon, and not one day or hour before. I thought the three long weeks would never have come to an end. I might, had I been differently situated, have taken my fill of enjoyment in Berlin,. and spent three pleasant weeks there. Unter den Linden, the Thier-Garten, Charlottenbourg, Potsdam, Krolls, the Tonhalle, Sans Souci, and Monbijou (pro- nounced Zang Zouzy and Mongpichou) are quite suf- ficient to make a man delectably comfortable on the spree: to say nothing of the art treasure-stored I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 21 Museum, Ranch's statue of the Great Frederic, Kiss's Amazon, and the sumptuous Opern-haus, with Johanna Wagner in the Tannhaiiser, and Marie Taglioni in Satanella. But they were all caviare to the million of Prussian blue devils which possessed me. I felt that I had no business in Berlin that I had no right to ap- plaud Fraulein Wagner that I ought to reserve my kid-glove reverberations for Mademoiselle Bagdanoff: that every walk I took Unter den Linden was so many paces robbed from the Nevskoi Perspective, and that every sight I took at the King of Prussia and the Princes of the House of Hohenzollern was a fraud on my liege literary masters, the Emperor of Russia and the scions of the house of Romanoff. Conscience-stricken as I felt, though void of guilt, I had my consolations few and spare, but grateful as Esmeralda's cup to the thirst-tortured Quasimodo. I heard the Oberon of Karl Maria von Weber performed with such a fervour and solemnity of sincerity, lis- tened to with such rapt attention and reverent Jove drunk up by a thousand greedy ears, bar by bar, note by note from the first delicious horn-murmur in the overture to the last crash in the triumphant inarch, in the finale, that I began at last to fancy that I was in a Cathedral instead of a theatre, and half- expected the congregation I mean the people to kneel when the bell rang for the fall of the curtain, and the brilliant lamps grew pale. An extra gleam of consolation was imparted to me, too, when I read in the Schauspiel-zettel, or play-bill, the printed avowal that the libretto of the opera had been into High Dutch rendered from the English of the Herr-Poem-Kon- struktor J. R. Planche. Again ; I saw the Faust of Wolfgang von GSthe the Faust as a tragedy, in all its magnificent and majestic simplicity. I don't think I clearly comprehended fifty phrases of the dialogue ; I could scarcely read the names of the dramatis per- 22 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. sonse in the play-bill ; and yet I would not have missed that performance for a pile of ducats ; nor shall I ever forget the actor who played Mephistopheles. His name is a shadow to me now ; the biting wit, the searching philosophy, the scathing satire in his speech were well-nigh Greek to me ; but the hood, the gait, the gestures, the devil's grin, the vibrating voice, the red cock's feather, the long peaked shoes, the sardonic- ally up-turned moustache, will never be erased from my mind, and will stand me in good stead for com- mentaries when (in the week of the three Thursdays, I suppose) I take heart of grace and sit down to study the giant of Weimar's masterpiece in the original. There was a pretty, blue-eyed, rosy-lipped Marguerite, whose hair had a golden sheen perfectly wondrous ; and Faust would have been a senseless stock not to have fallen in love with her; but, alas! she was too fat, and looked as if she ate too much; and when she wept for Faust gave me far more the impression that she was crying because, like the ebony patriarch Tucker, familiarly hight Dan, she was too late for her supper. Still, I came away from Faust almost happy. There might, perchance, at other times have been a surly pleasure in the discovery that Berlin gloves are apparently unknown at Berlin even as there are no French rolls in Paris and that Berlin wool is very little sought after. There might have been some ad- vantage gained to science by an attempt to analyse the peculiar smell of the capital of Prussia, which, to un- initiated noses, seems compounded of volatile essence of Cologne (not the eau, but the streets thereof) mul- tiplied by sewer, plus cesspool, plus Grande Rue de Pera, plus Rue de la Tixeranderie after a shower of rain, plus port of Marseilles at any time, plus London eating-house, plus Vauxhall bone-boiling establish- ment, plus tallow factory, plus low lodging-house in I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 23 Whitechapel, plus dissecting-room?, plus the "gruel thick and slab " of Macbeth's witches when it began to cool.* There might have been a temporary relief in expatiating on the geological curiosities of Berlin, the foot-lace rating pavement, and the Sahara-like sandy plain in which the city is situate. There might have been a temporary excitement, disagreeable but salubrious, in losing, as I did, half my store of Prussian notes in a cab, and cooling my heels for three successive days at the Police Presidium in frantically-fruitless inquiries (in very scanty German) after my departed treasure but there wasn't; no, not one atom. Though the Hotel de Russie boasted as savoury a table-d'hote as one would wish to find, likewise Rhine wine exhilarating to the palate and soothing to the soul, I began to loathe my food and drink. I longed for Russian caviare and Russian vodki. I came abroad to eat candles and drink train- oil or, at least, the equivalent for that which is popu- larly supposed to form the favourite food of our late enemies and not to feast on Bisque soup and supreme de volatile. Three weeks ! they seemed an eternity. The maestro whom I met at Potsdam went back to Cologne cheerfully : he was not bound for the land of the Russ ; and, having accomplished the object of his mission which I imagine to have been the engagement of a few hundred fiddlers departed in a droschky, his straw-coloured kids gleaming in the sunshine, and wishing me joy of my journey to St. Petersburg. Shall I ever get there, I wonder ? The Englishman who was a man of the world didn't come back. He of the red head (Mr. Eddystone I christened him from his beacon- like hair) took rail for Konigsberg, to see if there was anything in the steam-vessel line to be done there, and the buff waistcoat, who was commercially interested in * It is doubtful whether this description, written nearly two years ago, would not now more aptly apply to Father Thames. "24 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. tallow, boldly announced his determination not to stand it any longer, but to be off to St. Petersburg overland. Overland ! and why could not I also go overland ? The railway, I reasoned, will take me as far as this same Konigsberg, and proceeding thence by way of Tilsit, Tauroggen, Mittau, Riga, and Lake Tschudi, I can reach the much-desired Petropolis. There is the malle-poste, or diligence ; there is the extra-post ; there is the private TcibitJca, which I can purchase, or hire, and horse at my own charges from stage to stage. The journey should properly occupy ABOUT six days. ABOUT ! but a wary and bronzed Queen's messenger, who converses with me (he ought to know something, for he is on the half-pay of the dragoons, is a lord's nephew and the cousin of a secretary of state, spent fifty thousand pounds before he was five-and- twenty, and is now ceaselessly wandering up and down on the face of the earth with a red despatch-box, six hundred a-year, and his expenses paid) the Queen's messenger, bronzed and wary, shakes his head ominously. When the winter breaks up in Russia, he remarks, the roads break up too, and the travellers break down. He has often been overland himself, perforce (where hasn't he been ?), in winter ; and he has such marrow-freezing stories to tell (all in a cool, jaunty, mess-room-softened- by-experience manner), of incessant travelling by day and night, of roads made up of morasses, sand-hills, and deep gullies, of drunken drivers, of infamous post- houses swarming with all the plagues of Egypt, natu- ralised Russian subjects ; of atrociously extortionate Jew postmasters ; of horses rum ones to look at, and rummer, or worse ones, to go ; of frequent stoppages for hours together ; of an absolute dearth of anything wholesome to eat or drink, save bread and tea. He enlarges so much on the bruisings, bumpings, joltings, and dislocations to which the unfortunate victim of the I BEGIN. MY JOURNEY. 25 nominally six, but 'more frequently twelve days' over- land route is subject, that I bid the project avaunt like an ugly phantom, and, laying it in the Baltic Sea, determine to weather out the time as well as I can, till the seventeenth. I can't stop any longer in Berlin, however, that is certain. So I drive out of the Oranienberg Gate, and cast myself into a railway carriage, which, in its turn, casts me out at Stettin-on-the-Oder, eighty-four miles distant. And on the banks of that fearsome River Oder I pass May-day. On the Oder, too, I find the steamer in which, at some far remote period of my exist- ence, 1 suppose I am to occupy a berth. 1 find the * Preussischer-Adler ;' but woe is me ! she has taken to her bed in a graving-dock, and is a pitiable sight to see. There being something the matter with her boilers, they have dismasted her, leaving her nothing but clumsy stumps like wooden legs. They are scraping her all over, for some cutaneous disorder with which she is afflicted, I presume, and they are re-coppering her bottom, an operation which German shipwrights appear to me to perform with gum-arabic, Dutch metal, and a camel's-hair pencil. Altogether the 4 Prussian Eagle ' looks such a woe-begone, moulting, tailless, broken-beaked bird, and so very unlike going to Cronstadt, that I flee from her in dismay ; and boarding the ' Geyser,' which is trim, taut, and double-funnelled, steam swiftly through the Haf See to Swinemunde, and then across the East Sea to Copen- hagen. Plenty of time to see all that is to be seen in the chief city of Denmark ; to take the English company's railway to Roeskilde; to cross over to Malmoe in Sweden; to go back to Stettin to the Devil, I think, if this lasts much longer. There is a horrible persuasion forcing itself upon me now that I live in Berlin ; that my goal is there. Back to Berlin I 26 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. go. Letters are waiting for me. People I didn't know from Adam a month ago, and don't care a silbergroschen for, offer to kiss me on both cheeks, and welcome me Home. I suppose by this time I am a Prussian subject, and shall have to serve in the landwehr. Between that and blowing one's brains out there is not much dif- ference. I go back to Stettin, where I have a touch of the overland longing again (it is now the tenth of May), and a Jewish gentleman with an apple-green gabardine, lined with cat-skin, and a beard so ragged and torn, that I am led to surmise that he has himself despoiled the cats of their furry robes, and has suffered severely in the contest, is exceedingly anxious (he nosed me in the hotel lobby as an Englishman, within an hour of my arrival) that I should purchase a kibitka he has to sell. He only wants fifty thalers for it : it is a splendid kibitka, he says: -' sehr htibsch, schrecJclich ! wonder- schon ' so I go to look at it ; for I feel just in the sort of mood to buy a kibitka, or an elephant, a diving-bell, a mangle, or an organ with an insane monkey to grind it, and throw myself into the Oder immediately after- wards. I look at the kibitka, which I am to horse from stage to stage, and I deserve to be horsed myself if I buy it, so lamentable an old shandrydan is it. I quarrel with the Jew in the cat-skins on the subject, who calls me lord, and sheds tears. Finding that I am deter- mined not to throw away my thalers on his kibitka, he, with the elasticity in commercial transactions common to his nation, proposes that I should become the pos- sessor of a splendid dressing-case with silver-mountings ; but on my remaining proof against this temptation, as weil as against that of a stock of prime Hungarian tobacco, which is to be sold for a mere song, he changes blithely from seller to buyer, and generously offers to purchase at advantageous rates, and for ready money, any portion of my wardrobe I may consider superfluous. I BEGIN MY JOURNEY. 27 He is not in the least offended when I bid him go hang in the English language, and walk away moodily but calls after me in cheerful accents (by the title of Well-born Great British Sir*), that he has a fine English bull-pup to dispose of, dirt-cheap. After this, I have another look at the ' Preussischer- Adler,' which, by this time, has been turned, fur copper- ing purposes, nearly keel upwards, and looks as if she had abandoned herself to despair, as I have. Walk the streets of Stettin I dare not, for I am pursued by the hideous spectre of Thomas Tilder aus Tyrol, of whom more anon. Yes, Thomas, in these pages shall you, like noxious bat on barn-door, be spread out with nails of type ! And, as for Berlin, I am ashamed to show my face there again. The very clerks at the station seem to think it quite time for me to be in Russia ; and I am afraid the head waiter at the Hotel de Russie took it very ill that I came back last time. Yet I journey there, and back, and there again ; and in one of my journeys to Berlin 1 have my passport made good for Russia. The process is a solemn and intricate one, and merits a few words of notice. There is plenty of time ; they are hammering away at the Prussian Eagle's boilers yet. First, with great fear and trembling, I go to the hotel of the Russian em- bassy, which is a tremendous mansion, as big as a castle, under the Linden. I have borne the majority of Foreign Legations abroad with tolerable equanimity ; but I am quite overcome here by the grandeur, and the double eagle over the gate, and the vastness of the court-yard, and the odour of a diplomatic dinner, which is being cooked (probably in stew-pans of gold from the Ural mountains) ; but I am especially awed by a house-porter, or Suisse, of gigantic stature, possibly the largest Suisse that ever human ambassador possessed. He is not exactly like a beadle, nor a drum- * Hochwohl gebrmgross britannischerherr. 28 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. major, nor an archbishop (he wears a gold-embroidered alb), nor a field-marshal, nor [garter king-at-arms, nor my lord on May-day, but is something between all these functionaries in appearance. He has a long gilt- headed pole in his hand, much more like the ' mast of some tall ammiral,' than a Christian staff; and when I ask him the way to the passport-office, he magnanimously refrains from ejaculating anything about Fee-fo-Fum, or smelling the blood of an Englishman ; and, instead of eating me up alive on the spot, or grinding my bones to make his bread, he tells me, in a deep bass voice, to enter the second door on the left through the court-yard, and mount two pair of stairs. Here, in but ' 55 'Lads, sharpen your cutlasses/ was the signal of the Admiral who didn't breakfast in Cronstadt and dine in St. Petersburg. Let me put a fresh nib to my goose- quill, and see what I can do, in my humble way, to make some little impression on those granite walls. III. I LAND AT CRONSTADT. WE had no sooner cast anchor in the harbour of Cronstadt (it needed something to divert my attention, for I had been staring at the forts and their embrasures, especially at one circular one shelving from the top, like a Stilton cheese in tolerably advanced cut, till the whole sky swarmed before me, a vast plain of black dots), than we were invaded by the Russians. If the naval forces of his imperial majesty Alexander the Second display half as much alacrity in boarding the enemies ' ships in the next naval engagement as did this agile boarding-party of policemen and custom- house-officers, no British captain need trouble himself to nail his colours to the mast. The best thing he can do is to strike them at once, or put them in his pocket, and so save time and bloodshed. On they came like cats, a most piratical-looking crew to be sure. There were big men with red moustaches, yellow moustaches, drab moustaches, grey moustaches, fawn-coloured moustaches, and white moustaches. Some had thrown themselves into whiskers with all the energy of their nature, and had produced some startling effects in that line. A pair of a light-buff colour, poudre with coal- dust (he had probably just concluded an official visit to some neighbouring engine-room), were much ad- mired. There were men with faces so sun-baked, that their eyes looked considerably lighter than their faces ; there were others with visages so white and pasty that their little, black, Chinese eyes looked like currants in a suet-dumpling. And it was now, for the first time, 56 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. that, with great interest and curiosity, I saw the famous Russian military greatcoat that hideous capote of some coarse frieze of a convict-colour, half-grey, half- drab (the colour of inferior oatmeal, to be particular), which is destined, I suppose, to occupy as large a place in history as the redingote guise of the first Napoleon. These greatcoats buttoned straight down from the throat to the waist and from thence falling down to the heels in uncouth folds and gathered in behind with a buckle and strap of the same cloth had red collars and cuffs, the ibrmer marked with letters in a fantastic alphabet, that looked as a Greek Lexicon might look after a supper of raw pork chops. The letters were not Greek, not Arabic, not Roman, and yet they had some of the characteristics of each abecedaire. These gentry were police ^officers ; most of them wore a round flat cap with a red band ; and if you desire further details, go to the next toyshop and purchase a Noah's ark, and among the male members (say Shem Ham is too bright-looking) you will find the very counterpart of these Russian polizeis. One little creature, apparently about sixty years of age, almost a dwarf, almost hump- backed, and with a face so perforated with pockmarks that, had you permission to empty his skull of its con- tents, you [might have used him for a cullender and strained maccaroni through him but with a very big sword and a fierce pair of moustaches ; this small Muscovite I named Japhet on the spot. He walked and fell (over my portmanteau, I am sorry to say) all in one piece ; and, when he saluted his officer (which every one of the privates seemed to do twice in every three minutes), and which salute consists in a doffing of the cap and a very low bow, he seemed to have a hinge in his spine, but nowhere else. There were men in authority amongst these policemen, mostly athletic, big-whiskered fellows, who looked as if they did the knocking-down part of the police business (shall 1 ever I LAND AT CRONSTADT. 57 know better what these large-whiskered men do, I wonder ?) These wore helmets with spikes on the top ,-md the Double Eagle, in the brightest tin, in front. They must have been mighty warriors too, some of them; for many were decorated with medals and crosses, not of any very expensive materials, and sus- pended to ribbons of equivocal hue, owing to the dirt. On the broad breast of one brave I counted nine medals and crosses (I counted them twice, carefully, to be quite certain) strung all of a row on a straight piece of wire ; and, with their tawdry scraps of ribbons, looking exceedingly like the particoloured rags you see on a dyer's pole. Some had great stripes or galons of coppery -looking lace on their sleeves; and there was one officer who not only wore a helmet, but a green surtout laced with silver, the ornaments of which were inlaid with black dirt and grease in a novel and taste- ful manner. The custom-house officers wore unpre- tending uniforms of shabby green, and copper buttons : and the majority of the subordinates, both polizeis and douaniers, had foul Belcher handkerchiefs twisted round their necks. There were two other trifling circum- stances peculiar to these braves, which, in my quality of an observer, I may be allowed to mention. Number one is, that nearly all these men had no lobes to their ears.* Number two is, that from careful and minute peeping up their sleeves and down their collars, I am in a position to declare my belief that there was not one single shirt among the whole company. About the officer I cannot be so certain. I did not venture to approach near enough to him ; but I had four hours' opportunity to examine the privates (as you will shortly hear), and what I have stated is the fact. A Hottentot private gentleman is not ordinarily considered to be a model of cleanliness. It is difficult in England to find * This is a physical peculiarity I have observed in scores of Russians some of them in the highest classes of society. 58 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. dirtier subjects for inspection than the tramps in a low lodging-house ; but for dirt surpassing ten thousand times anything I have ever yet seen, commend me to our boarding-party. They were, assuredly, the filthiest set of ragamuffins that ever kept step since Lieutenant- Colonel Falstaffs regiment was disbanded. I am thus particular on a not very inviting subject, because the remarkable contrast between the hideous dirt of the soldiery on ordinary, and their scrupulous cleanliness on extraordinary occasions, is one of the things that must strike the attention (and at least two of the senses) of every traveller in Russia. On parade, at a review, whenever he is to be inspected, a Russian soldier (and under that generic name I may fairly include policemen and douaniers in a country where even the postmen are military) is literally outwardly at least as clean as a new pin. But it would seem that it is only under the eye of his emperor or his general that the Muscovite warrior is expected to be clean ; for, on every occasion but those I have named, he is the dirtiest, worst-smelling mortal to be found anywhere between Beachy Head and the Bay of Fundy. I am fearful, too, lest I should be thought exaggerating on the topic of shirts ; but it is a fact that the Russians, as a people, do not yet understand the proper use of a linen or cotton under-garment. The moujiks, who wear shirts, are apparently in the same state of doubt as to how to wear them, as the Scottish Highlanders were on the subject of pantaloons after the sumptuary laws of seventeen hundred and forty-six. Poor Alister Mac- alister carried the breeches which the ruthless Sassenach government had forced on him, on the top of his walking-pole. Ivan Ivanovitch wears his shirt, when he is lucky enough to possess one, outside his trousers, after the manner of a surplice. The soldier thinks that the uniform greatcoat covers a multitude of sins, and wears no shirt at all. According to the accurate I LAND AT CRONSTADT. 59 Baron de Haxthausen, the kit of every Russian soldier ought to contain three shirts ; but theory is one thing, and practice another ; and I can L state, of my own personal experience, that I have played many games of billiards with Russian officers even (you can't well avoid seeing up to your opponent's elbow at some stages of the game), and that if they possessed shirts, they either kept them laid up in lavender at home, or wore them without sleeves. The unsavoury boarders who had thus made the Preussischer-Adler their prize, very speedily let us know that we were in a country where a man may not, by any means, do what he likes with his own. They guarded the gangway, they pervaded the wheel, and not only spoke to the man thereat, but rendered his further presence there quite unnecessary. They placed the funnel under strict surveillance, and they took possession of the whole of the baggage at one fell swoop, attaching to each package curious little leaden seals stuck on bits of string, and inscribed with mys- terious hieroglyphs strongly resembling the Rabbinical cachets which the Hebrew butchers in Whitechapel Market append to their joints of meat. Then a tall douanier began wandering among the maze of chests, portmanteaus, and carpet-bags ; marking here and there a package in abstruse and abstracted manner with a piece of chalk, as though he were working out mathematical problems. We were not allowed to carry the smallest modicum of luggage on our persons ; and as I had been incautious enough, just before our arrival in harbour, to detach my unlucky courier's bag from my side, and to hold it in my hand, I was soon unpleasantly reminded of the stringency of the customs' regulations of the port of Cronstadt. The tall douanier pounced upon the harmless leather pouch quite gleefully, and instantaneously declaring (in chalk) on the virgin leather that the angle A G was equal 60 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. to the angle G B, added it to the heap of luggage \vhich then encumbered the deck. There it lay, with the little French actress's swandown boa. and I am happy to state, my old enemy Miss Wapps's per- forated air-cushion. But Miss Wapps made the steward the wretchedest man in Russia for about five minutes ; so fiercely did she rate him on the sequestration of that chattel of hers. There was a dead pause, a rather uncomfortable status quo about this time, everybody seemed to be waiting for the performances to begin, and the board- ing-party looked, in their stiff, awkward immobility, like a band of * supers ' waiting the arrival of the tyrant. Only the little creature who was nearly a hunchback was active ; for the mathematical genius had gone to sleep, or was pretending to sleep on a sea- chest, with his head resting in his chalky hands. It seemed to be the province of this diminutive but lynx- eyed functionary to guard against the possibility of any contraband merchandize oozing out of the baggage after it had been sealed ; and he went peering, and poking, and turning up bags and boxes with his grimy paws, sniffing sagaciously meanwhile, as if he could discover prohibited books and forged bank notes by scent. Captain Steffens had mysteriously disappeared ; and the official with the silver-lace, inlaid with dirt, was nowhere to be found. About this time, also, it oc- curred to the crew taking advantage of this forty- bars rest to send a deputation aft, consisting of a liairy mariner in a fur-cap, earrings, a piebald cowskin waistcoat, a green shirt, worsted net tights and hessians, to solicit trinkgeld) or drink-money. On the deputa- tion ushering itself into my presence, with the view above stated, I informed it politely, and in the best German I could muster, that I had already paid an extravagant price for my passage, and that I would see the deputation fried before I gave it a groschen ; and I LAND AT CRONSTADT. 61 soon after this, the stewards, probably infected by some epidemic of extortion hovering in the atmosphere of Russia, began to make out fabulous bills against the passengers for bottles of champagne they had never dreamt of, and cups of coffee they had never consumed. And, as none of us had any Russian money, and every one was anxious to get rid of his Prussian thalers and silbergroschen, the deck was soon converted into an animated money-market, in which some of us lost our temper, and all of us about twenty per cent, on the money we changed. There was a gentleman on board of the Hebrew persuasion a very different gentleman however, from my genial friend from Posen, or from the merchant in the cat-skins at Stettin who had brought with him of all merchandise in the world ! a consignment of three hundred canary-birds. These little songsters had been built up into quite a castle of cages, open at all four sides ; the hatches of the hold had been left open during the voyage ; and it was very pretty and pastoral to hear them executing their silvery roulades in the beautiful May evening, and to see the Hebrew gen- tleman (he wore a white hat, a yellow waistcoat, a drab coat, light-grey trousers and buff slippers, and, with his somewhat jaundiced complexion, looked not unlike a canary-bird himself), go down the ladder into the hold, to feed his choristers and converse with them in a cheerful and friendly manner. But he was in a pitiable state of tribulation ; firstly, because he had learnt that the customs' duties on singing birds in Russia were enormous ; and,, secondly, because he had been told that Jews were not suffered to enter St. Petersburg.* He turned his coat-collar up, and pulled his hat over * I am not aware of the existence of any Oukase positively for- bidding Jews to settle at St. Petersburg: but it is certain that there are no Jews in the Russian capital. In other parts of the empire a distinction is made between the Karaite Jews, who abide 62 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. his eyes with a desperate effort to make himself look like a Christian ; but he only succeeded in travestying, not in disguising, himself; for, whereas, he had looked a frank, open Jew, say, like Judas Maccabaeus; he, now, with his cowering and furtive mien, looked un- speakably like Judas Iscariot. He was sorely annoyed, too, at the proceedings of one of the policemen, who, having probably never seen a canary-bird before, and imagining it to be a species of wild beast of a diminutive size, was performing the feat of stirring it up with a long pole, by means of a tobacco-pipe, poked between the wires of one of the cages, and was apparently much surprised that the little canary declined singing under that treatment. But, courage, my Hebrew friend ! you have brought your birds to a fine market, even if you have to pay fifty per cent, ad valorem duty on them. For, be it known, a canary sells for twenty-five silver roubles in Russia for nearly four pounds ! and, as for a parrot, I have heard of one, and two hundred roubles being given for one that could speak French. The wag from the South of France had not been idle all this time. Who but he counterfeited (while he was not looking) the usage and bearing of the little semi-humpbacked policeman, and threw us into convul- sions of laughter ? Who but he pretended to be dread- fully frightened at the officer in the dirt-inlaid lace, running away from him, after the manner of Mr. Flex- more the clown, when he is told that the policeman is coming? Who but he addressed the very tallest douanier in the exact voice, and with the exact gesture of the immortal Punch (at which we went into fits, of course, and even the adamantine Miss Wapps con- descended to smile), pouring forth a flood of gibberish, by the law of the Old Testament, and the Rabbinical Jews, who hold by the Talmud. The former are tolerated and protected ; but the latter are treated with great rigour, and are not permitted to settle in the towns. I LAND AT CRONSTADT. 63 which he declared to be Russian ? The douanier looked very ferocious, and I thought the wag would have been knouted and sent to Siberia ; but he got over it some- how, and gave the customs' magnate a cigar, which that brave proceeded, with great gravity and delibera- tion, to chew, and they were soon the best friends in the world. I was getting very tired of assuring myself of the shirtlessness of the boarders, whom I had now been inspecting for nearly three quarters of an hour, when Captain StefFens reappeared, this time without the telescope, but with the thirty passports as usual flutter- ing in the breeze, and a pile of other papers besides. He had mounted his epaulettes again, had Captain StefFens, and a stiffer shirt-collar than ever; and on his breast nearest his heart there shone a gold enamel- led cross and a particoloured riband, proclaiming to us awe-stricken passengers and to the world in general, that Captain StefFens was a knight of one of the thou- sand and one Russian orders. It might have been a Prussian order, you may urge. No, no, my eyes were too sharp for that. Young as I was to Russia, I could tell already a hawk from a handsaw, and the august split crow of the autocrat from the jay -like black eaglet of Prussia. I think Captain Steifens' decoration was the fifteenth class of St. Michael the Moujik. The chief mate was also in full fig ; and, though he could boast no decoration, he had a tremendous pin in his shirt, with a crimson bulb a-top like a brandy-ball. And Captain Steffens and his mate were both arrayed in this astounding costume evidently to do honour to and receive with respect two helmeted beings, highly laced, profusely decorated, and positively clean, who now boarded the steamer from a man-o'-war's gig alongside, and were with many bows ushered into the saloon. Whether he had dropped cherub-like from aloft, where he had been looking out for our lives, or risen 64 A JOURNEY DUE SOUTH. like Venus from the salt-sea spray, or come with the two helmets in the gig though I could almost make affidavit that he was not in it when it rowed alongside, or boarded the Prussian Eagle in his own private wherry, or risen from the hold where he had lain con- cealed during the voyage, or been then and there incarnated from the atmospheric atoms ; whether he came as a spirit but so would not depart, I am utterly incapable of judging ; but this is certain, that at the cabin door there suddenly appeared Mr. Edward Wright, comedian. I say Mr. Wright advisedly ; be- cause, although the apparition turned out to be a Russian to the back-bone, thigh-bone, and hip-bone, and though his name was very probably Somethingo- vitch or Off, he had Mr. Wright's voice, and Mr. Wright's face, together with the teeth, eyeglass, white ducks, and little patent tipped boots of that favourite actor. And he was not only Mr. Wright, but he was Mr. Wright in the character of Paul Pry minus the costume, certainly, but with the eyeglass and the um- brella to the life. I am not certain whether he wore a white hat, but I know that he carried a little locked portfolio under one arm, that his eyes without the slightest suspicion of a squint were everywhere at once ; that he grinned Mr. Wright as Paul Pry's grin incessantly ; that he was always hoping he didn't intrude ; and that he did intrude most confoundedly. ' Police ?' I asked the Russian in a whisper. My accomplished friend elevated and then depressed his eyebrows in token of acquiescence, and added 'Orloff!' ' But Count Orloff is in Paris,' I ventured to remark/ ' I say Orloff when I speak of ces gens-la, answered the Russian. ' He is of the secret police Section des Etrangers counsellor of a college, if you know what, that is ? Gives capital dinners.' ' Do you know him ?' I LAND AT CRONSTADT. 65 * I know him !' repeated the Russian ; and, for the first time during our acquaintance, I saw the expression of something like emotion in his face, and this ex- pressed contemptuous indignation. ' My dear sir, we English, a French, or an American sailor in a similar position, I could not help admitting that Russia is a country where discipline is understood, not only in theory, but in practice. The interior of the pyroscaphe did not belie her ex- terior. She was appointed throughout like an English nobleman's yacht. There was a tiny saloon with rose- wood fixings, distemper paintings in gilt frames, damask hangings, held up by ormolu Cupids, and mirrors- galore, for the fair ladies to admire themselves in. The little French actress immediately converted one of them into the prettiest picture-frame you would desire to see in or out of Russia ; and, leaving Miss Wapps- to inspect her blue-bronzed nose in another, I went on deck, where there were benches on bronzed legs and covered with crimson velvet, and camp-stools with seats worked in Berlin wool. I have been told that the officers of the Russian navy have a pretty talent in that genre of needlework. My Russian friend who* by this time had utterly forgotten (so it seemed) my existence had found a friend of his in the person of the commander of the steamer, and the pair had retired to that officer's private cabin to drink champagne. Always champagne. I noticed that when they recog- nised each other at first, it was (oddly enough) in the French language that their salutations were inter- changed. We were yet in the Gulf of Finland, and the canal of the Neva was still far off, when Captain Smith who, it will be remembered, had gone over to the- enemy, or Wapps faction came over to me with over- tures of peace. He had somehow managed to save 1 those boots of his out of the general confiscation wreck. I LAND AT CRONSTADT. 73 and carried them now like buckets. He had his rea- sons for an armistice, the captain ; for he remarked that we might be of great service to one another in the Custom-house. ' You help me, and 1*11 help you,' said Captain Smith. This was all very fair and liberal, and on the live and let live principle, which I heartily ad- mire ; but, when the captain proffered a suggestion that I should help him by carrying the abhorred boots with the sheepskin linings, and proceeded to yoke me with them, milkman fashion, I resisted, and told him, like Gregory, that I'd not carry coals nay, nor boots either. On this he went on another tack ; and, conveying me to a secret place under the companion- ladder, earnestly entreated me to conceal, on his behalf, underneath my waistcoat, a roll of very sleezy sky-blue merino, which he assured me was for a dress for his little daughter Gretchen, and which he had hitherto concealed in the mysterious boots. I must say that the sky-blue merino did not look very valuable : I don't think, in fact, that it was worth much more than a ' tarn ;' and I did not relish the. idea of becoming an amateur smuggler on other merchant's account. But what was I to do ? The captain was a bore, but the father had a claim to my services. It was pleasant, besides, to think that the captain had a daughter at all a bright-eyed little maid, with soft brown hair, perhaps ; and I pictured her to myself in the sky-blue merino sitting on the captain's knee, while that giant mariner told her stories of his voyages on the salt seas, and forbore in love from saying anything about the perilous ice and the magnetic islands ; nay, glossed over his shipwreck off the Isle of Weasel, and made- out the supercargo to be an angel of light rather than a ' tarn tief.' So I smuggled Captain Smith's sky-blue merino through the Custom-house for him ; and if I had no sorer sin than that on my conscience, I should go> to bed with^a light heart to-night. 74 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. In gratitude for this concession the captain proposed a drink, to which I, nothing loth for I was quite faint with the heat and delay consented. The refreshment- room was a little mahogany box below, with a cut-glass chandelier hanging from the ceiling, about half-a-dozen sizes too large for the apartment. There was a bar covered with marble, and a grave waiter in black, with a white neckloth and white gloves : a waiter who looked as if, for private or political reasons, he was content to hand round schnapps, but that he could be an am- bassador if he chose. There was a bar-keeper, whose stock of French was restricted to these three words, JEau-de-vie^ Moossoo, and Rouble-argent. He made liberal use of these ; and I remarked that, although it was such a handsome pyroscaphe with a chandelier, and camp-stools worked in Berlin wool, the bar-keeper took very good care to have the rouble-argent in his hand, before he delivered the Eau-de-vie to a Moossoo. Paying beforehand is the rule in Russia, and this is why the Russians are such bad paymasters. The little mahogany box is crammed with passengers, talking, laughing, and shaking hands with each other in pure good-nature, as men will do when they come to the end of a tedious journey. The wag from the south of France was in immense force, and incessantly ejacu- lated ' Vodki ! Vodki !' capering about with a glass of that liquor in his hand, and drinking and hobnob- bing with everybody. I tried a glass of vodki,* and immediately understood what genuine blue ruin was. For this Vodki was bright blue, and it tasted ugh ! of what did it not taste ? Bilge-water, vitriol, turpen- tine, copal-varnish, fire, and castor-oil ! There was champagne, and there was Lafitte, too, to be had, Cognac, brantewein, schnapps, aniseed (of which the Russians are immoderately fond), and an infinity of butter-brods spread with caviare no more, no more * Or Vodka, both terminations seem to be used indifferently. I LAND AT CRONSTADT. 75 tif that ! dried belouga, smoked salmon, cold veal, bacon, sardines, and tongue. I don't know the exact figures of the tariff of prices ; but I know that there was never any change out of a silver rouble. In this convivial little den, Captain Smith in his turn found a friend. This was no other than Petersen ; and nothing would serve Captain Smith, but that I must be introduced to Petersen. ' De agent vor de gompany that used do go do Helsingfors,' he whispered. What company, and what the deuce had I to do with the gompany, or with Petersen ? However, there was no help for it, and I was introduced. Petersen, da- guerreotyped, would have passed very well for the likeness of Mr. Nobody ; for his large head was joined to his long legs, with no perceptible torso, and with only a very narrow interval or belt of red plush waistcoat between. He had the face of a fox who was determined to be clean shaved or to die ; and, indeed, there was not a hair left on his face, but he had gashed himself terribly in the operation, and his copper skin was laced with his red oxide-of-lead blood. He had a hat so huge and so furry in nap, that he looked with it on, like the Lord Mayor's sword-bearer, and he may, indeed, have been the mysterious Sword-bearer's young man, of whom we heard so much during the sittings of the City Corporation Commission. When I was introduced to him as ' Mister aus England,' (which was all Captain Smith knew of my name,) he opened his wide mouth, and stared at me with his fishy, spherical eyes with such intensity, that I fancied that the sockets were pop-guns, and that he meant to shoot the aqueous globes against me. The open mouth, I think, really meant something, signifying that Petersen was hungry, and desired meat ; for the Captain immediately afterwards whispered to me that we had better offer Petersen a beefsteak. Why any beefsteak of mine should be offered to Peter- sen I know no more than why the celebrated Oozly 76 A JOURNEY DUE NOKTH. bird should hide his head in the sand, and whistle through the nape of his neck ; but I was stupefied, dazed with the vodki and the chandelier, the confusion of tongues, and Petersen's eyes and hat, and I nodded dully in consent. A beefsteak in Russia means meat and potatoes, and bread, cheese, a bottle of Moscow beer, and any pretty little tiny kickshaws in the way of pastry that may strike William Cook. Petersen, who had accepted the offer by lifting the sword-bearer's hat, began snapping up the food like a kingfisher ; and as regards the payment, the we (Captain Smith being busily engaged somewhere else with his boots) turned out to be me, and amounted to a silver rouble. Three and threepence for Petersen ! He was to give me some valuable information about hotels, and so forth, Peter- sen ; but his mouth was too full for him to speak. He changed some money for me, however, and gave me, for my remaining thalers, a greasy Russian rouble note, and some battered copecks. I am inclined to think that Petersen benefited by this transaction considerably. All at once there was a cry from the passengers above, of ' Isaacs ! Isaacs !' and, leaving Petersen still wolfing my beefsteak, I hastened on deck. We had entered long since the canal of the broad, shallow, false, shining, silvery, Neva, in which the only navigable channel was marked out by flags. We had left on our right hand the palaces of Oranienbaum and Petergoff, and now we saw right ahead, flashing] in the sun like the orb of a king, the burnished dome of the great cathedral of St. Izak. Then the vast workshops and ship-building yards of Mr. Baird ; then immense tallow warehouses (looking like forts again), and then, starting up on every side, not by twos or threes, but by scores.,, and as if by magic, the golden spires and domes of Petersburg ! 1 say starting up : it is the only word. Some half- dozen years ago I was silly ,enough to go up in a I LAND AT CRONSTADT. 77 balloon, which, bursting at the altitude of a mile, sent its passengers down again. We fell over Fulham ; and I shall never forget the agonising distinctness with which houses, chimneys, churches seemed rushing up to us instead of we coming down to them. I specially remember Fulham church steeple, on which I expected every moment to be transfixed. Now, though the plane was horizontal, not vertical, the effect was exactly similar ; and, as if from the bosom of the Neva, the churches and palaces started up. We went, straight as an arrow from a Tartar's bow, into the very heart of the city. No suburbs, no streets gradually growing upon you, no buildings gradually increasing in density. We were there ; alongside the English quay, in sight of the Custom-house and Ex- change, within a stone's throw of the Winter Palace, bard by the colossal statue of Peter the Great, nearly opposite the senate and the Saint Synode, close to the ministry of war, within view of the Admiralty, and under the guns of the fortress, before you could say Jack Robinson. The English quay? Could this be Russia ? Palaces, villas, Corinthian columns, elegantly-dressed ladies with parasols and lapdogs, and children gazing at us from the quay, handsome equipages, curvetting cava- liers, and the notes of a military band floating on the air. Yes : this was Russia ; and England was fifteen hundred real, and fifteen thousand moral, miles off. The handsome granite quays and elegantly- dressed ladies were not for us to walk on, or with, just yet. A double line of police sentries extended from a little pavilion in which we landed to a low whitewashed arch- way on the other side of the quay, from which a flight of stone steps led apparently into a range of cellars. Walking, tired and dusty, through this lane of stern policemen (Liberty and the ladies peeping at us over the shoulders of the polizeis), I could not resist an odd 78 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. feeling that I had come in the van from the house of detention at Cronstadt to the county gaol at Peters- burg, and that I was down for three months, with hard labour ; the last week solitary. Curiously enough, at balls, soirees, and suppers, at St. Petersburg, at Moscow, in town and country, I could never divest myself of that county-gaol feeling till I got my discharge at Cronstadt again, three months afterwards. IV.' I PASS THE CUSTOM-HOUSE, AND TAKE MY FIRST RUSSIAN WALK. SCHINDERHANNES, the renowned robber of the Rhine, once encountered, so the story goes, in a foraging ex- pedition between Mayence and Frankfort, a caravan of a hundred and fifty Jews. It was a bitter January night : snow twelve inches deep on the ground, and Schinderhannes didn't like Jews. And so, in this manner, did he evilly entreat them. He did not slay them, nor skin them, nor extract their teeth, as did King John ; but he compelled every man Moses of them to take off his boots or shoes. These he mixed, pell-mell, into a leathern salad, or boot-heap, and at day-break, but not before, he permitted the poor frost-bitten rogues to find their chaussures, if they could. Setting aside the superhuman difficulty of picking out one's own particular boots among three hundred foot coverings, the subtle Schinderhannes had reckoned, with fiendish ingenuity, on the natural acquisitiveness of the Jewish race. Of course every Hebrew in- stinctively sought for the boots with the best soles and upper-leathers, "and stoutly claimed them as his own ; men who had never possessed anything better than a pair of squashy pumps, down at heel, and bulging' at the sides, vehemently declared themselves the rightful owners of brave jack-boots with triple rows of nails ; and the real proprietors, showing themselves I PASS THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 79 recalcitrant at this new application of the law of meum and tuum, the consequence was a frightful uproar and contention: such a fighting and squabbling, such a shrieking and swearing in bad Hebrew and worse German, such a rending of gabardines and tearing of beards, and clawing of hooked noses, had never been in Jewry, since the days of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. A friend of mine told me that he once saw the same experiment tried in a Parisian violon, or lock-up house, after a bal masque. The incarcerated postilions du Longjumeau, titis, debardeurs, Robinson Crusoes, and forts de la halle becoming uproarious and kicking at the iron-stanchioned door, the sergents de ville entered the cell, and unbooted every living prisoner. And such a scene there was in the morning in the yard of the poste, before the masqueraders went to pay their respects to the Commissary of Police, that Monsieur Gavarni might describe it with his pencil, but not I, surely, with my pen ! I have related this little apologue to illustrate the characteristic, but unpleasant, proceedings of the Rus- sian custom-house officers, when we had given up our keys, in one of the white-washed cellars on the base- ment of a building on the INGLISKAIA NABERE- JENAIA, or English Quay, and when those officials proceeded to the examination of our luggage. Either they had read Mr. Leitch Ritchie's Life of Schinder- hannes, or they had an intuitive perception of the modus agendi of the Robbers of the Rhine, or they had some masonic sympathy with the Parisian police agents ; for such a turning up of boxes and turning out of their contents, and mixture of their severalties, pell-mell, higgledy-piggledy, helter-skelter, jerry-cum- tumble, butter upon bacon, topsy-turvy, muck, mess, and muddle, I never saw in my life. There was a villanous douanier, who held a bandbox under one arm, and seemed desirous of emulating the popular 80 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. hat-trick of Herr Dobler ; for he kept up a continual cascade of gloves, collars, eau-de-Cologne bottles, combs, hair-brushes, guide-books, pincushions, and lace cuffs, till I turned to look for the accomplice who was supplying him with fresh band-boxes. Now, the custom- house officers of every nation I have yet travelled through have a different manner of examining your luggage. Your crusty, phlegmatic Englishman turns oter each article separately but carefully. Your stupid Belgian rummages your trunk, as if he were trying to catch a lizard ; your courteous Frenchman either lightly and gracefully turns up your fine linen, as though he were making a lobster salad, or much more fre- quently if you tell him you have nothing to declare, and are polite to him, just peeps into one corner of your portmanteau, and says, (Test assez ! Your sen- tentious German ponders deeply over your trunk, pokes his fat fore-finger into the bosom of your dress-shirts, and motions you to shut it again. But none of these peculiarities had the Russians. They had a way of. their own. They twisted, they tousted, they turned over, they held writing-cases open, bottom upwards, and shook out the manuscript contents, like snow-flakes. They held up coats and shirts, and examined them like pawnbrokers. They fingered ladies' dresses like Jew clothesmen. They punched hats, and looked into their linings ; passed Cashmere shawls from one to the other for inspection; opened letters, and tried to read their contents (upside down), drew silk stockings over their arms ; held boots by the toes, and shook them ; opened bottles, and closed them again with the wrong corks; left the impress of their dirty hands upon clean linen and virgin writing-papers ; crammed ladies' under-garments into gentlemen's carpet-bags, forced a boot-jack into the little French actress's reti- cule, dropped things under-foot, trod on them, tore them, and laughed, spilt eau-de-Cologne, greased silk I PASS THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 81 with pomatum, forced hinges, sprained locks, ruined springs, broke cigars, rumpled muslin, and raised a cloud of puff-powder and dentrifice. And all this was done, perhaps not wantonly, perhaps only in igno- rant savagery ; but, with such a reckless want of the commonest care, with such a hideous vacarme of shouting, screaming, trampling, and plunging, that the only light I could view the scene in besides the Schinderhannes one was in the improbable event of Mr. and Mrs. KEELEY travelling through the country of the Patagonians, falling into a gigantic ambuscade, and having their theatrical wardrobe overhauled by those overgrown savages. Yet I was given to understand that the search was by no means so strict as it had habitually been in former years. Special instructions had even been issued by the government, that travellers were to be subjected to as little annoyance and delay in passing through the custom-house as were possible. That some rigour of scrutiny is necessary, and must be expected, 1 am not going, for one moment, to deny : the great object of the search being to discover books prohibited by the censure, and Russian bank-notes genuine or forged (for the importation or exportation of even good notes is illegal, and severely punished). Touching the books, the Russian government is wise. II est dans son droit. One volume of Mr. CART.YLE would do more harm to the existing state of things than millions of spurious paper roubles. Not, but what the most jealous watch- fulness is justifiable in the detection of forged notes, and the prevention of the real ones leaving the country, as models for forgery. The paper currency is enor- mous ; there is nothing very peculiar about the paper of the note, and, though its chalcography is sufficiently complicated, and the dreadful pains and penalties denounced against the forgers, and the holders of forged notes, are repeated no less than three times in sue- G 82 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. cessively diminishing Russian characters on the back ; the last repetition being literally microscopic ; it is all plain sailing in printing and engraving, and there are few clever English or French engravers, who would have any difficulty in producing an exact copy of the ' Gos- sudaria Kredit Billiet' of all the Russias. I have been told by government employes, and bankers' clerks, that they can detect a bad bank-note immediately and by the mere sense of touch ; but I apprehend that the chief test of genuineness is in the state into which every note passes after it has been for any time in cir- culation : intolerable greasiness and raggedness. The mass of the people are so grossly ignorant, that the note might as well be printed in Sanskrit as in Russ for them : they cannot even decipher the figures, and it is only by the colour of the note that an Ischvostchik or a Moujik is able to tell you its value. Among the hecatomb of luggage that had been brought from the deck of the pyroscaphe into this cave of Trophonius, I had looked for some time vainly, for anything belonging to me, one glimpse indeed I caught of my courier's bag, skimmering through the air like a bird, and then all resolved itself into anarchy, the confusion of tongues, and the worse confusion of wearing apparel again. My keys were of not much .service, therefore, to the officer in charge of them ; and it was of no use addressing myself to any of the doua- niers or porters, for none of them spoke anything but Russ. A length I caught sight of a certain big black trunk of mine groaning (to use a little freedom of illustration) under a pile of long narrow packing-cases <(so long that they must have contained young trees, or stuffed giraffes), addressed to his excellency and highness, &c., Prince Gortchakoff; and, being plas- tered all over with double eagle brands and seals, were, I suppose, inviolable to custom-house fingers. I pointed to the big black trunk ; I looked steadily I PASS THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 83 at the custodian of my keys, and I slipped Petersen's paper rouble (crumpled up very small) into his hand. The pink lid of his little grey eye trembled with the first wink I had seen in Russia ; and, in another twink- ling of that eye, my trunk was dragged from its captivity, and ready for examination. But there is a vicious key to that trunk which refuses to act till it has been shaken, punched, violently wrenched, and abusively spoken to ; and while the officer, having exhausted the first, was applying the last mode of persuasion (in Russ), I availed myself of the opportunity to chink some of the serviceable Petersen's copeck pieces in my closed liand. The key having listened to reason, my friend, with whom I was now quite on conversational terms, made a great show of examining my trunk : that is to say, he dived into it (so to speak) head foremost, and came up to the surface with a false collar in his teeth ; but it was all cry and no wool, and I might have had a complete democratic and socialist library and half a million in spurious paper money for aught he knew or cared. Then I gave him some more copecks, and said something to him in English, which 1 think he didn't understand ; to which he responded with some- thing in Russ, which I am perfectly certain I didn't understand ; and then he chalked my box, and let me go free to be taken into custody, however, imme- diately afterwards. He even recovered my courier's bag for me, which an irate douanier had converted into a weapon of offence, swinging it by a strap in the manner of the Protestant Flail to keep off over- impatient travellers. Such an olla podrida as there was inside that courier's bag, when I came to examine it next morning ! I need scarcely say that I had no Russian paper money with me, either in my luggage or on my person ; and 1 must admit, to the honour of the Russian cus- tom-house, that we were exempted from the irritating G2 84 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. and degrading ceremony of a personal search. That system is, I believe, by this time generally exploded on the continent flourishing only in a rank and weedy manner in the half-contemptible, half-loathsome Dogane- of Austrian Italy, and (now and then, when the officials are out of temper) at the highly important seaport of Dieppe in France. As for books, I had brought with me only a New Testament, a Shakspere and a Johnson's Dictionary. The first volume incurs no danger of con- fiscation in Russia. The Russians to every creed and sect, save Roman Catholicism and that branch of Judaism to which I have previously alluded, are as> contemptuously tolerant as Mahomedans. Russian translations of the Protestant version of the Bible are common ; the volumes of the British and Foreign Bible Society are plentiful in St. Petersburg, and Russians of the better class are by no means reluctant to attend the worship of the Anglican Church, both in Moscow and Petersburg. But it is for the Romish communion that the Russians have the bitterest hatred, and for which all the energy of their persecution is- reserved. Tolerated to some extent in the two capi- tals as, where there are so many foreigners, it must necessarily be it is uniformly regarded with distrust and abhorrence by the Greek Church ; and I do believe that, in a stress of churches, an orthodox Russian would infinitely prefer performing his devotions before a pot-bellied fetish from Ashantee, than before the jewelled shrine of our Lady of Loretto. I think, on the whole, I passed through the custom- house ordeal rather easily than otherwise. Far dif- ferent was it with Miss Wapps, who, during the pro- cess of search, was a flesh sculptured monument of Giantess Despair, dovetailed with the three Furies blended into one. This uncomfortable woman had in her trunk for what purpose it is impossible to sur~ mise the working model of a power-loom, or a steam- I PASS THE CUSTOM-HOUSE. 85 plough, or a threshing-machine, or something else equally mechanical and inconvenient ; and the custom- house officer, who evidently didn't know what to make of it, had caught his finger in a cogged wheel, had broken one of his nails, and was storming in a towering rage at Miss Wapps, in Russ ; "while she, in a rage quite overpowering his in volume, was objurgating him in English, till a superior official charged at Miss Wapps, Cossack fashion, with a long pen, and conveyed lier, clamouring, away. Sundry red-bearded men, in crimson shirts and long white aprons, and with bare muscular arms, which would have been the making of them as artists' models in England, had been wrestling with each other and with me, both mentally and physically, for the honour of conveying my luggage to a droschky. But much more had to be done before I could be allowed to de- part. All the passengers had to enter an appearance before a fat old gentleman in green, and bright but- tons, who sat in a high desk like a pulpit, while a lean, long man, his subordinate, sat at another desk below him, like the parson's clerk. This fat old gentleman, who spoke English, French, and German wheezily but fluently, was good enough to ask me a few questions I had heard before : as my age, my pro- fession, whether I had ever been in Russia before, and what might be my object in coming to Russia now ? He entered my answers in a vast ledger, and then, to my great joy, delivered to me my beloved Foreign- office document, with the advice to get myself im- matriculated without delay. Then I paid more copecks to a dirty soldier sitting at a table, who made ' Mus- covite, his mark/ on my passport for I do not believe he could write ; then more copecks again to another policeman, who pasted something like a small pitch- plaster on my trunk ; and then I struggled into a courtyard, where there was a crowd of droschkies ; 86 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. and, securing with immense difficulty two of these vehicles one for myself and one for my luggage was driven to the hotel where I had concluded to stop. You have seen, in one of the panoramas that infest our lecture-halls, after painted miles of river, or desert, or mountain have been unrolled, to the tinkling of Madame Somebody on the piano, the canvas sud- denly display the presentment of a cheerful village, or a caravan of pilgrims, or an encampment of travellers, smoking and drinking under the green trees ; then the animated picture is rolled away into limbo again, and the miles of mountain, or river, or desert, begin again. So passed away the unsubstantial alliance of us- thirty living travellers. We had walked, and talked, and eaten, and drunk together, and liked and disliked each other for three days and nights ; and now we parted in the droschky-crowded yard, never to meet again. To revisit the same cities, perhaps inhabit the same streets, the same houses, to walk on the same side of the pavement, even to remember each other often, but to meet again no more. So will it be, per- chance, with Greater things in the beginning of the End ; and life-long alliances and friendships which we vainly call lasting, be reckoned merely as casual travel- ling companionships made and broken in a moment in the long voyage that will last eternal years. I am incorrigible. If you want a man to explore the interior of Australia, or to discover the North- West Passage, or the sources of the Niger, don't send me. I should come back with a sketch of Victoria Street, Sydney, or the journal of a residence in Cape Coast Castle, or notes of the peculiarities of the skipper of a Hull whaler. If ever I write a biography it will be the life of John Smith ; and the great historical work which is to gild, I hope, the evening of my days will be a Defence of Queen Elizabeth from the scandal I TAKE MY FIRST RUSSIAN WALK. 87 unwarrantably cast upon her, or an Account of the death of Queen Anne. Lo I I have spent a summer in Russia ; and I have nothing to tell you of the Altai mountains, the Kirghese tribes, Chinese Tartary, the Steppes, Kamschatka, or even the Czar's corona- tion. [I fled the country a fortnight before it took place.] I have learnt but two Russian cities [it is true I know my lesson by heart], St. Petersburg and Mos- cow ; and my first-fruit of Petersburg is that withered apple the Nevskoi-Perspective. You know all about it already, of course. I can't help it. In Brussels my first visit is always to the Manneken. On arriving in Paris I always hasten, as fast as my legs can carry me, to the Palais Royal ; I think I have left a duty unaccomplished in London when I come to it after a long absence, if I delay an hour in walking down the central avenue of Covent Garden Market. These are cari luoghi to me, and to them I must go. I have not been twenty minutes established in Petersburg, before I feel that I am due on the Nevskoi ; that the houses are waiting for me there ; that the Nevskoians are walking up and down, impa- tient for me to come and contemplate them. I make a mental apology for keeping the Nevskoi waiting, in order to indulge in a warm bath ; after which I feel as if I had divested myself of about one of the twelve layers of dust that seem to have been accumulating on my epidermis since I left London. Then I refect my- self inwardly, with my first Russian dinner ; and, then, magnanimously disdaining the aid of a valet de place, or even of a droschky- driver ; quite ignorant of Russ, and not knowing my right hand from my left in the way of Russian streets ; I set boldly forth to find out the Nevskoi. It is about seven in the evening. I walk, say three-quarters of a mile, down the big street in which my hotel is situated. Then I find myself in a huge 88 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. triangular place, of which the quays of the Neva form one side, with an obelisk in the midst. I touch my hat to a bearded man in big boots, and say * Nevsko'i ?' inquiringly. He takes off his hat, smiles, shows his teeth, makes a low bow, and speaks about a page of small pica in rapid Russ. I shake my head, say ' No bono, Johnny/ (the only imbecile answer I can call up after the torrent of the unknown tongue,) and point to the right and to the left alternately, and with inquiring eyebrows. The bearded man points to the right far away to the right, which I conjecture must be "the other side of the river. ' Na Prava,' I think he says. I discover afterward?, that Na Pravo (the o pronounced as a French a] does mean to the right. To the right about I go, confidently. I cross a handsome bridge of stone and wrought iron, on which stands a chapel, before whose shrine crowds of people of all classes are standing or kneeling, praying, and crossing themselves devoutly. When I am on the other side of the bridge, and standing in a locality I have already been introduced to the English quay I accost another man, also in beard and boots, and repeat my monosyllabic inquiry : Nevsko'i. It ends, after a great deal more of the unknown tongue, by his pointing to the left. And to the left again I go, as bold as brass. I pursue the line of the quay for perhaps half a mile, then, bearing to the left, I find myself in another place so vast, that I begin to pitch and roll morally like a crazy bark on this huge stone ocean. It is vast, solitary, with a frowning 7 palace-bound coast, and the Nevsko'i harbour of refuge nowhere to be seen. But a sail in sight appears in the shape of a soldier. A sulky sail he is, however ; and, refusing to listen to my signal-gun of distress, holds on his course without laying- to. I am fain, for fear of lying-to myself all the day in this granite Bay of Biscay to grapple with a I TAKE MY FIRST RUSSIAN WALK. 89 frail skiff in the person of a yellow-faced little girl, in printed cotton. Another monosyllabic inquiry, more unknown tongue (very shrill and lisping this time), and ultimately a little yellow digit pointed to the north- east. Then I cross from where stands a colossal equestrian statue, spurring fiercely to the verge of an artificial rock and trampling a trailing serpent beneath his charger's feet, and on whose rocky pedestal there is the inscription ' Petro Primo ; Catharina Secunda.' I cross from the statue of Peter the Great some weary hundreds of yards over stone billows, (so wavy is the pavement) to the north-east corner of that which I afterwards know to be the Admiraltecskaia Plochtchad, or great square of the Admiralty ; but here, alas I there is a palace whose walls seem to have no cessation for another half mile, north-east. And there are no more sails in sight, save crawling droschkies, and I begin to have a sensation that my compass must be near the magnetic islands, when I unpreparedly turn a sharp angle, and find myself among a throng of people, and in the Nevsko'i Prospekt. It begins badly. It is not a wide street. It does not seem to be a long street. The shops don't look handsome ; the pavement is execrable, and though people are plenty, there is no crowd. It is like a London street on a Sunday turned into a Parisian street just after an emeute. It ought to be lively at half-past seven in the evening in the month of May, in the very centre of an imperial city of six hundred thousand inhabitants. But it isn't lively. It is quite the con- trary : it is deadly. This is the place, then, I have been fretting and fuming to see : this is the Boulevard des Italiens of St. Petersburg. This the Nevskoi. As for the per- spective, there is no perspective at all that I can see. It is more like Pimlico. There is a street in that royalty-shadowed suburb called Churton Street, in 90 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. which the Cubit-Corinthian mansions at its head melt gradually into the squalid hovels of Rochester Row, Westminster, at its tail. The houses on the Nevskoi are big, but I expect them to make a bad end of it. Here is a palace ; but not far off, I gloomily prophesy, must be Westminster, and the rat-catcher's daughter. And have I come all the way, not exactly from West- minster, but certainly from t'other side of the water, to see this ? By this time I have walked about twenty- five yards. I have not walked thirty-five yards, before my rashly -formed Nevskoi opinions begin to change. I have not walked fifty yards, before I discover that the Nevskoi is immensely wide and stupendously long, and magnificently paved. I have not walked a hundred yards, before I make up my mind that the Nevskoi- . Perspective is the handsomest arid the most remarkable street in the world. There are forty Perspectives, Mr. Bull, in this huge- bowelled city. I do not wish you to dislocate your jaw in endeavouring to pronounce the forty Muscovite names of these perspectives ; so, contenting myself with delicately hinting that there is the Vossnessensk Pros- pekt, likewise those of Oboukhoff, Peterhoff, Ismailoff, and Semenovskoi, I will leave you to imagine the, rest, or familiarise yourself with them gradually, as they per- spectively turn up in these my travels. But you are to remember, if you please, that the Nevskoi extends in one straight line from the great square of the Admiralty to the convent of Saint Aleksander-Nevskoi, a distance of two thousand sa genes, or four versts, or one French league, or three English miles ! And you will please to think of that, Mr. Bull, or Master Brooke, and agree with me that the Nevskoi is something like a street. This astonishing thoroughfare, now one corridor of palaces and churches, and gorged with the outward and visible riches of nobles, and priests, and merchants, I TAKE MY FIRST RUSSIAN WALK. 91 was, a century and a half ago, but a bridle-path through a dense forest leading from a river to a morass. The road was pierced in seventeen hundred and thirteen, and a few miserable wooden huts thrown together on its borders by the man who, under Heaven, seems to have made every mortal thing in Russia Peter the Great. Now, you find on the Nevskoi the cathedral of Our Lady of Kasan, the Lutheran church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, the great Catholic church of the Assumption, the Dutch church, the imperial palace of Anitchkoff, the splendid Aleksandra theatre, the Place Michel, with its green English square, its palace, and its theatre; the Slrogonoff Palace, the RoumiantzofF Palace, the Galitzin Palace, the Belozelski Palace, the Branitzky Palace, the the for goodness' sake, go fetch a guide-book, and see how many hundred palaces more ! On the Nevskoi are the f'aqades of the curious semi-Asiatic bazaar, the Gostinnoi-Dvor, the imperial library (O ! British Museum quadrangles, glass roof, duplicate copies, five thousand pounds' worth of deco- ration, museum flea, and all, you are but a book-stall to it !j, the Armenian church, the monuments of Souvorov (our Suwarrow, and spelt in Russ thus: Cybopob), of Barclay de Tolly. On to the Nevskoi debouch the aristocratic Morskaias, which, the Balchoi and the Mala, or Great and Little, are at once the Bond Streets and the Belgravias of Petersburg. On to the Nevskoi opens the Mala Millione, a short but courtly street terminated by a triumphal archway, monstrous, and magnificent, surmounted by a car of Victory, with its eight horses abreast in bronze, and through which you may descry the red granite column of the Czar Aleksandra Pavlovitch (Napoleon's Alexander) and the immense Winter Palace. On to the Nevskoi yawns the long perspective of the Liteina'ia, the dashing street of the Cannouschina, or imperial stables, the palace and garden-lined avenue of the Sadovvaia, or 92 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. Great Garden Street. And the Nevsko'i is intersected by three Venice-like canals ; by the canal of the Mo'ika, at the Polizeisky-Most, or Police Bridge; by the Ekaterinmskoi, at the Kasansky-Most, or Kasan Bridge ; and by the Fontanka (Count Orloff's office the office where ladies have been, like horses, 'taken in to bait ') is on the Fontanka) at the Anitchkoff Bridge. At about five hundred sagenes from this bridge there is another canal, but not quite so handsome a one the Ligoff. And at one extremity of this Nevsko'i of wonders is a convent as big as an English market-town, and with three churches within its walls, while the other end finishes with the tapering golden spire of the Admiralty (there are two Admiralties in this town-residence of the Titans), which Admiralty has a church, a library, an arsenal, a museum, a dock- yard, and a cadets' college under its roof, and such an unaccountable host of rooms, that I think every cabin-boy in the fleet must have a separate apartment there when he is on shore, and every boatswain's cat have a private store-room for each and every one of its nine tails. At the first blush, seven in the evening would not seem precisely the best chosen time for the minute ex- amination of a street one had never seen before. In England or France, at this early spring-time, it would be sunset, almost twilight, blind man's holiday. And there is not a gas-lamp on the Nevsko'i to illumine me in my researches. The posts are there : massive, profusely ornamented pillars of wrought-iron or bronze ; but not a lamp for love or money. But you will under- stand the place when I tell you that it will be broad staring daylight on the Nevsko'i till half-past eleven of the clock to-night ; that after that time there will be a soft, still, dreamy, mysterious semi-twilight, such as sometimes veils the eyes of a woman you love, when you are sitting silent by her side, silent and happy, I TAKE MY FIRST EUSSIAN WALK. 93 thinking of her, while she, with those inscrutable twi- light orbs, is thinking of God knows what (perhaps of the somebody else by whose side she used to sit, and whom you would so dearly love to strangle, if it were all the same to her) ; and then, at half-past one in the morning, comes the brazen staring morning light again. For from this May middle to the end of July, there will be no more night in St. Petersburg. No night ! why can't you cover up the sky then ? why not roof in the Nevskoi the whole bad city with black crape? Why not force masks on all your slaves, or blind them ? For, as true as heaven, there are things done here that God's sun should never shine upon. Cover up that palace. Cover up that house on the Fontanka. Cover up, for shame's sake, that police- yard, that Christians may not hear the women scream* Cover them up thick and threefold ; for of a surety,, if the light comes in, the truth will out, and Palace and Fontanka, house and Gaol-yard walls, will come tum- bling about your ears, insensate and accursed, and crush you. At the Admiralty corner of the Nevskoi I make my first cordial salutation to the fine arts in Russia. This long range of plate-glass windows appertains to an ingenious Italian, Signer Daziaro, whose handsome print-shop, with the elaborate Russian inscription on the frontage, has no doubt often pleased and puzzled you on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris ; and who has succursal fine-arts' establishments in Moscow, in Warsaw, and I believe also in Odessa, as well a& this one in St. Petersburg. Daziaro is the Russian Ackermann's. For the newest portrait of the Czar, for the latest lithographs of the imperial family, for the last engraving after Sir Edwin Landseer, the last paysage by Ferogio, the last caricature (not political, be it well understood, but of a Lorette or debardeur tendency) of Gavarni or Gustave de Beaumont, you 94 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. must go to Daziaro's. His windows, too, display the same curious thermometer of celebrity as those of our printsellers. A great man is disgraced, and sinks into oblivion. One day he dies, and then people suddenly remember him (for about two days), as he was before he wasn't. Presto ! his portrait appears in Daziaro's window. Half-a-dozen copies of his portrait are sold during his two days' resuscitation ; and then he is re- legated to the portfolio again, and slumbers till his son wins a battle, or runs away with somebody else's wife, or is made a minister, or is sent? to Siberia, or does something for people to remember and talk about (for about two days more), what Monsieur his father was. When, failing the son's portrait, the astute Daz-iaro gives the respected progenitor another airing in the print-shop window ; and so on till we ripe and rot, all of us. And thereby hangs a tale. Is this only Russian ? Is it not so the whole world over? There was a thermometer of this sort in a print-shop at the corner of Great and Little Queen Streets, Lincoln's-Inn Fields, London, which I used to pass every morning ; and the fresh portraits in the window were as good as the news of the day to me. The thermometer in Daziaro's is more apparent, more significant, and more frequently consulted ; for this is a country where the news of the day is scarce ; where, in an intolerable quantity of waste paper, there is about a copeck's worth of news ; and where the real stirring daily intelligence is muttered in dark entries, and whispered behind hands in boudoirs, and glozed from lip to ear over tumblers of tea, and scribbled on blank leaves of pocket books passed hastily from hand to hand, and then the blank leaves converted instantly into pipe-lights. As a general rule you can find out much easier what is most talked about by con- sulting Signor Daziaro's window, in preference to the Journal de St. Petersbourg. Art, D&zisiro passim, is in no want of patrons. The I TAKE MY FIRST RUSSIAN WALK. 95 shop is thronged till ten o'clock in the evening (when all shops on the Nevsko'i are closed). The stock of prints seems to comprise the very rarest and most expensive ; and you may be sure that a liberal per-centage has been added to the original price (however heavy) to meet the peculiar views of the Russian public. The Russian public that which rides in carriages, and can buy beautiful prints, and has a soul to be saved the only Russian public that exists of course, or is recognised on the Nevsko'i ; this genteel public does not like, and will not buy cheap things. Cheap things are low, com- mon, vulgar, not fit for Nous Autres. Ivan Ivanovitch, the Moujik, buys cheap things. And so articles must not only be dear, but exorbitantly dear, or Andrei Andreivitch the merchant, who is rich but thrifty, would compete with Nous Autres, which would never do. Andreii will give a hundred roubles for his winter fur. This would be shocking to the genteel public ; so crafty Frenchmen and Germans open shops on the Nevsko'i, where a thousand silver roubles are charged and given for a fur pelisse, not much superior to the merchant's. There are dozens of these * Pelz-Magasins,' or fur- riers' shops, on the splendid Nevsko'i, and even more splendid are their contents. In a country which even in the hottest summer may be described as the Polar Regions with the chill off (imagine, if you like, a red- hot poker substituted for the icy pole itself) and which for five, and sometimes six months in the year is a frigid hell, it may be easily conceived that furs, with us only the ornaments of the luxurious, are necessities of life. Ivan the Moujik does not wear a schooba or fur pelisse, but pauvre diable as he is, scrapes together eight or ten silver roubles wherewith to buy a touloupe, or coat of dressed sheepskin, whose woolly lining keeps him tolerably warm. But from the humblest employe to Prince Dolgorouki, every one above the condition of a serf must have a schooba of some sort or other for 96 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. winter. Some wear catskins, like my friend the Jew y who wanted me to buy the kibitka at Stettin. The Gostinno'i Dvor merchants wear pelisses of white wolf- skin underneath their long cloth caftans. The fur of the squirrel, the Canada marmot, and the silver fox of Siberia, are in great request for the robes of burgesses* wives and employes' ladies. The common soldiers wear sheepskins under their gray capotes, the officers have cloaks lined with the fur of the bear or wolf. But Nous Autres the Dvoryanin or Russian noble the Seig- neur, with his hundreds of serfs and hundreds of thou- sands of roubles for him and for Madame la Princesse y his spouse, are reserved the sable pelisse, the schooba of almost priceless furs, thick, warm, and silky ; a garment that is almost an inheritance, and which you spend almost an inheritance to acquire. One hundred and fifty pounds sterling I have observed this is the price of a first-class schooba on the Nevskoi. There are, to be sure, certain murky warehouses in the Gostinno'i Dvor, where a Russian with a taste for bargaining and beating down (and that taste is innate to the Muscovite) may purchase a sable pelisse for a third of the money mentioned. In Germany, particularly at Leipsic, furs or schoppen are still cheaper ; and one pelisse to each traveller passes through the custom-house duty free ; yet the Russian aristocracy neglect this cheap mart, and hold by the Nevskoi Pelz-Magasins. We all re- member what Hudibras says of the equality of pleasure between cheating and being cheated. Next in importance to the furriers are the jewellers. Now I comprehend why the profession of a diamond- merchant is so important in Leipsic and Amsterdam, and where the chief market for diamonds is to be found.. Every jeweller's window has an Alnaschar's basket of almost priceless gems displayed in it. Rings, bracelets,, necklaces, carcans, vivieres, earrings, stomachers, bou- quets, fan-mounts, brooches, solitaires, all blazing I TAKE MY FIKST RUSSIAN WALK. 97 %yith diamonds so large that the stock of Howell and James, or Hunt and Roskell, would look but as pedlars' packs of penny trinkets beside them. No money in Hussia ! Put that figment out of your head as soon as ever you can : there is enough wealth in these Nevskoi .shop-windows to carry on a big war for half-a-dozen years longer. They are not outwardly splendid though, these jewellers. No plate-glass ; no Corinthian columns; .no gas-jets with brilliant reflectors. There is an oriental dinginess and mystery about the exterior of the shops. The houses themselves in which the shops are situated iiave a private look, like the banker's or the doctor's, or the lawyer's in an English country town magnified a thousand-fold ; and the radiant stock is displayed in something like a gigantic parlour window, up a steep flight of steps. There is a miserable moujik, in a greasy sheepskin, staring in at the diamonds, munching a cu- cumber meanwhile. This man-chattel is a slave, con- demned to hopeless bondage, robbed, despised, kicked, beaten like a dog ; and he gazes at Prince Legreeskoff's jewels with a calmly critical air. What right ? but, be quiet ; if I come to right, what right have I to come to Muscovy grievance-hunting^when I have left a thou- sand grievances at home, crying to heaven for redress ? The tailors, whose name is that of ten legions, and who are very nearly all French and Germans, have no shops. They have magnificent suites of apartments on Nevskoi first floors ; and their charge for making a frock-coat is about eight guineas sterling, English. You understand now what sort of tailors they are. They are too proud, too high and mighty, to content themselves with the simple sartorial appellation, and have improved even upon our home-snobbery in that line ; calling themselves not only Merchant Tailors, but Kleider meisters (Clothes masters) ; Undertakers for Military Habiliments (Entrepreneurs d'habillemens militaires) ; Confectioners of Seignorial Costume, and the like high- 98 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. sounding titles. You are to remember that St. Peters- burg is permanently garrisoned by the Imperial Guard,, which is something like one hundred and fifteen thou- sand strong ; that the epauletted mob of officers (whose- pay is scarcely sufficient to defray the expenses of their boot- varnish) are, with very few exceptions, men of large fortune, and that the government does not find them in so much as a button towards their equipment. And as the uniforms are gorgeous in the extreme, and very easily spoilt, the Undertaker of Military Habiliments- makes rather a good thing of it than otherwise in the capital of the Czar. Bootmakers abound Germans, almost to a man 1 whose grim shops are fortalices, with stern jack- boots frowning at you through the windows. And shops and palaces, palaces and shops, succeed each other for mile after mile, till I am fairly worn out with magnificence, and, going home to bed, determine to take the Nevsko'i-mixture as before, to-morrow. V. ISCHVOSTCHIK ! THE DROSCHKY-DRIVER. I AM not quite certain, I must premise, as to the orthography of the Russian Cabby's name. It is a national characteristic of the Russians, never to give a direct answer to a question ; and, although I have asked at least twenty times, of learned Russians, how to spell the droschky-driver's appellation with correctness, the philologists were for the most part evasively dubious, and readier to ask me questions about the head-dresses of the British Grenadiers, than to give me a succinct reply. Perhaps, they have not them- selves yet made up their minds as to the proper position of the vowels and consonants in the word ; for, though M. Karamsin is generally understood to have settled the Russian language some years since, con- siderable orthographical licence yet prevails, and* is, ISCHVOSTCHIK ! THE DROSCHKY-DRIVER. 99 to some extent, tolerated. A sovereign, less conci- liating than the Czar Alexander, would very soon set the matter right by an oukase ; and woe to the Russian then who didn't mind his P's and Q's ! As it is, there seem to be as many ways of pronouncing the cabby's name, as the American prairie. I have heard him myself called indifferently Ischvostchik, istvosschik, issvostchik, and isvoschchik. When you hail him in the street, you are permitted to take another liberty with his title, and call out lustily iss'vosch ! The choice of a subject in the driver of a public conveyance, in any city, familiar as he must be to every traveller, is not very defensible on the score of novelty ; but as I should not have the slightest hesi- tation in taking a Piccadilly Hansom cabman as a type of character, and drawing him as best I could to the life, if I had a salutary purpose to serve I shall make no more bones about sketching the ischvostchik, than if he were a new butterfly, or an inedited fern, or a Niarn-Niam, or any other rare specimen entomo- logical or zoological. And I have a plea, if needful, wherewith to claim benefit of clergy; this: that the ischvostchik is thoroughly, entirely, and to the back- bone, in speech, dress, look, manners and customs, Russian. I was repeatedly told, while yet new to the Holy Land, that I must not take St. Petersburg as by any means a sample of a genuine Russian city. It was a French, a German, an English, a cosmopolitan town what you will ; but for real Russian customs and costumes, I must go to Moscow, to Novgorod, to Kasan, to Smolensk, to Kharkoff, or to Vladimir. Error. I do not think that in the whole world there exists a nation so thoroughly homogeneous as Russia. In our little scrap of an island, there are two-score dialects, at least, spoken ; and a real north- country man can scarcely make himself understood to a southerner ; but here, if H 2 100 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. you will once bear in mind the two divisions of race into Great Russians and Little Russians, you may go a thousand versts, without finding a vowel's difference in accentuation, or a hair's-breadth alteration in a caftan, or a Kakoshnik. The outlying nationalities sub- ject to the Double Eagle's sway the Finns, the Laps, the German Russians, (Esthonians, Livonians, &c.), the Poles, the Cossacks, and the Tartars, have of course their different languages and dresses ; but they are not Russians : the Imperial Government recognises their separate nationality in everything save taxing them, making soldiers of them, and beating them; but the vast mass of millions the real Russians 'are from province to province, from government to government, all alike. At the end of a week's journey, you will find the same villages, the same priests, the same policemen, the same Moujiks and Ischvostchiks, in appearance, dress, language, and habits, as at the commencement of your voyage. You who have crossed St. George's Channel to Dublin, or the Grampians to Edinburgh, will remember the striking contrast be- tween the cabman you left in London, and the Irish car-driver who rattled you up Westmoreland Street, or the canny Jehu who conveyed you in a cab to your hotel in the Scottish metropolis. Take but a jaunt of half a dozen miles by rail out of London, and you will scarcely fail to remark the difference between Number nine hundred and nine from the Wellington Street stand, and the driver of the fly from the Queen's Arms, or the Terminus Hotel. They are quite different types of coachmanhood. But in Russia, the Ischvostchik who drives you from the Admiralty at St. Petersburg, to the Moscow railway station, is, to a hair of his beard, to a plait in his caftan, to a sneezing penultimate in his rapid Russ, the very coun- terpart, the own Corsican brother, of the Ischvostchik who drives you from the terminus to the Bridge of ISCHVOSTCHIK ! THE DROSCHKY-DRIVER. lOl the Marshals in Holy Moscow, four hundred and fifty miles away. Stay : there is one difference in costume. The Petersburg Ischvostchik wears a peculiar low- crowned hat, with a broad brim turned up liberally at the sides ; whereas, the Moscow cabby, more particu- larly, affects a Tom and Jerry hat with the brim pared closely off, and encircled by a ribbon and three or four buckles a hat that has some remote resemblance to a genuine Connaught bogtrotter's head-covering. Du reste, both styles of hat are common, and indifferently worn by the Moujiks all over Russia, only the low- crowned hat being covered with a silk nap, and in some cases with beaver, is the more expensive, and is, therefore, in more general use in Petersburg the luxu- rious. Don't believe those, therefore, who endeavour to persuade you of the non-Russianism of St. Peters- burg, There is a great deal of eau-de-Cologne con- sumed there ; the commerce in white kid gloves is enormous ; and there is a thriving trade in wax candles, pineapple ices, patent leather boots, Clicquot's cham- pagne, crinoline petticoats, artificial flowers, and other adjuncts to civilization. Grisi and Lablache sing at the Grand Opera ; Mademoiselle Cerito dances there ; French is habitually spoken in society ; and invitations to balls and dinners are sent to you on enamelled cards, and in pink billets smelling of musk and millefleurs ; but your distinguished Origin may come away from the Affghan ambassador's balls, or the Grand Opera, or the Princess Liagouschkoff's tableaux vivans, your head full of Casta Diva, the Valse a deux temps, and the delightful forwardness of Russian civilization ; and your Origin will hail an Ischvostchik to convey you to your domicile ; and right before you, almost touch- ing you, astride on the splashboard, will sit a genuine rightdown child of Holy Russia, who is (it is no use mincing the matter) an ignorant, beastly, drunken, idolatrous savage, who is able to drive a horse, and to 102 A JOURXEY DUE NORTH. rob, and no more. Woe to those who wear the white kid gloves, and serenely allow the savage to go on in his dirt, in his drunkenness, in his most pitiable joss- worship (it is not religion), in his swinish ignorance, not only (it were vain to dwell upon that) of letters, but of things that the very dumb dogs and necessary cats in Christian households seem to know instinctively ! Woe to the drinkers of champagne when the day shall come for these wretched creatures to grow raving mad instead of sillily maudlin on the vitriol brandy, whose monopoly brings in a yearly revenue of fifty millions of roubles (eight millions sterling) to the paternal go- vernment, and when the paternal stick shall avail no more as a panacea. I know nothing more striking in my Russian experience, than the sudden plunge from a hothouse of refinement to a cold bath of sheer barbarism. It is as if you left a presidential levee in the White House at Washington, and fell suddenly into an ambuscade of Red Indians. Your civilisation, your evening dress, your carefully selected stock of pure Parisian French, avail you nothing with the Isch- vostchik. He speaks nothing but Russ ; he cannot read ; he has nothing, nothing in common with you closely shaven (as regards the cheeks and chin) and swathed in the tight sables of European etiquette, as you are he in his flowing oriental caftan, and oriental beard, and more than oriental dirt. It is possible, nay a thing of very common occur- rence, for a foreigner to live half a dozen years in Russia, without mastering the Russian alphabet, or being called upon to say, ' How do you do ?' or ' Good- night !' in Russ. Many of the highest Russian nobles are said indeed to speak their own language with anything but fluency and correctness. But, unless you want to go afoot in the streets (which in any Rus- sian town is about equivalent to making a pilgrimage to the Holy House at Loretto, with unboiled peas in ISCHVOSTCHIK ! THE DROSCHKY-DRIVER. 103 your shoes), it is absolutely necessary for you to ac- quire what I may call the Ischvostchik language, in order to let your conductor know your intended des- tination. The language is neither a very difficult, nor a very copious one. For all locomotive purposes it may be resumed into the following ten phrases. 1. Na prava To the right. 2. Na leva To the left. o. Pouyiama Straight on. Right ahead. 4. Stoi Stop ! 5. Pashol-Scorre'i Quick, go a-head. 6. Shiva'i Faster. 7. Dam na Vodka I'll stand something to drink above the fare. . Durak Fool. 9. Sabakoutchelovek Son of a dog ! 10. Tippian You're drunk. These phrases are spelt anyhow ; the Ischvostchik language being a lingua non scripta, and one that I studied orally, and not grammatically; but I have written the words to be pronounced as in French : and, if any of my readers, intending to visit Russia, will take the trouble to commit this slender vocabulary to memory, they will find it to all droschky-driving intents and purposes sufficient for their excursions in any Russian town from Petersburg to Kasan. There are some facetious Russians who supersede the verbal employment of the first four of these phrases by synonymous manual signs. Thus, being always seated outside, and immediately behind the driver, they substitute for ' to the right' a sharp pull of the Ischvostchik's right ear. Instead of crying 'to the left ' they pull him by the sinister organ of hearing ; a sound ' bonneting ' blow on the low-crowned hat, or, indeed, a blow or a kick anywhere is considered as equi- valent to a gentle reminder to drive faster : and, if you wish to pull up, what is easier than to grasp the Ischvostchik by the throat and twine your hand into 104 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. his neckerchief, pulling him violently backwards, meaa- while, till he chokes or holds hard ? It is not often, I confess, that this humorous system of speech with- out words is required, or, at least, practised in Peters- burg or Moscow ; but in the country, where Nou Autres are at home, these, and numerous other waggish modes of persuasive coercion, are in use for the benefit of the Ischvostchik. I remember a young Russian gentleman describing to me his overland kibitka. journey from Moscow to Warsaw. He travelled with his mother and sister : it was in the depth of winter j and he described to me in freezing accents the horrors of his situation, compelled as he was to sit outside the kibitka by the side of the Ischvostchik (or rather yem- schik ; for, when the droschky-driver drives post-horses he becomes a postilion, whether he bestrides his cattle or the splash-board). ' Outside,' I said, ' was there no room inside the carriage ?' ' O, yes ! plenty of room,'' was the naive reply of this young gentleman ; ' but you see I had to sit on the box, because we had no servant with us, and there was nobody to beat the postilion/ For the Russian driver on a Russian road, receives- always as much, and frequently much more, stick than his cattle. (Ischvostchiks and Yemschiks are pro- verbially merciful to their beasts.) You have to beat him whether you fee him or not. Without the stick he will go to sleep, and will not incite his horses into any more rapid pace than that which is understood by a snail's gallop. It is a sad thing to be obliged to* record ; but it is a fact that even as money makes the mare to go, so it is the stick that makes the Russian driver to drive ; and, just as in the old days of Irish posting it used to be necessary for the near leader to- be touched up on the flank with a red-hot poker before he would start, so the signal for departure to a kibitka driver is ordinarily a sounding thwack across the shoulders. In the two great capitals, happily, words will serve.- ISCHVOSTCHIK ! THE DROSCHKY-DRIVER. 105 as well as blows ; and to the Petersburg or Moscow Ischvostchik the intimation of ' Dam na vodka/ or even ' vodka,' simply, will seldom fail in procuring an augmentation of speed. But I grieve to say that the epithets, ' fool !' ' you're drunk !' and especially the terrible adjuration ' sabakoutchelovek !' ' son of a dog T are absolutely necessary in your converse with the Ischvostchik, particularly when the subject of fare- comes to be discussed. Every Ischvostchik will cheat his own countrymen, and I need not say will stick it on to foreigners in the proportion of about two hundred and eighty-five per cent. He will not have the slightest, hesitation in asking a rouble for a fifteen kopecks' course ; and it is all over with you if you hesitate for a moment, or endeavour to reason out the matter (by nods, smiles, and shrugs) amicably. Pay him the proper fare, accompanying the payment by the em- phatic * durak I' If this does not satisfy the Ischvost- chik, utter the magical sabakoutchelovek in the most awful voice you can command, and walk away. If he- presume to follow you, still demanding more money, I scarcely know what to advise you to do ; but I know,, and the Ischvotchik knows also, to his sorrow, what Nous Autres do under such circumstances. One thing,, in charity and mercy, I entreat you not to do. Don t call in a police-soldier to settle the dispute. As sure as ever you have that functionary for an arbitrator, so> sure are you to be mulcted of some more money, and so sure is the miserable Ischvostchik, whether right or wrong, whether he has received under or over fare, so> sure is that slave of a slave either to have his nose flattened or a tooth or two knocked down his throat on. the spot by the fist of the buotosnik, or police-soldier, or to be made to look in at the next convenient oppor- tunity at the nearest police-station, or siege, and there to be scourged like a slave as he is, and like a dog. as he ought not to be. 106 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. The way these wretched men are beaten, both openly And privately, is revolting and abominable. I have .seen a gigantic police-soldier walk coolly down the Nevskoi, from the Pont de Police totheKasan church, beating, cuffing across the face, pulling by the hair, and kicking every single one of the file of Ischvostchiks who, with their vehicles, line the kerb. To the right and left, sometimes on to the pavement, sometimes into the kennel and under their horses' feet, went the poor bearded brutes under the brawny fists of this ruffianly Goliath in a gray gaberdine. I saw him remount the Nevskoi to his standing-place, exactly repeating his pugilistic recreation saw it from a balcony over- hanging this same Nevskoi, where I was standing with ladies, and with officials in clanking spurs. We had a lap-dog too in the balcony, and in the saloon inside an Italian music-master was capering with his nimble fingers on a grand piano ; while down below, the man in gray was felling the Ischvostchiks. What their offence had been whether standing an inch too -close to, or an inch too far from the pavement, I do not know ; but I know that they were, and that I saw them, thus beaten; and I know that they took their hats off, and meekly wiped the blood from their mouths and noses ; arid gave way to not one word or gesture of resistance or remonstrance ; but I know that, in the wake of that bad ship Greycoat, there were left such a trail of white vengeful faces, of such gleaming eyes, of such compressed lips, that were I Greycoat 1 would as soon pass through the nethermost pit, as down that line of outraged men, alone, at night, and without my police helmet and my police sword. It is not pleasant, either, to know that every time your unfortunate driver happens to lock the wheel of a private carriage he is due at the police-station, there to consume the inevitable ration of stick ; it is horribly unpleasant to sit, as I have often done, behind a fine ISCHVOSTCHIK ! THE DROSCHKY-DRIVER. 107 stalwart bearded man a Hercules of a fellow and, when you see the tips of a series of scarlet and purple wheats appearing above the collar of his caftan and end- ing at the nape of his neck, to be convinced after much elaborate inductive reasoning, that there are some more wheals under his caftan that his back and a police- corporal's stick have come to blows lately, and that the stick has had the best of it. A droschky is a necessary of life in Russia ; it is not much a subject for astonishment, therefore, that there should be above three thousand public droschkies in Saint Petersburg, alone, and nearly two thousand in Moscow. Besides these, there are plenty of hack- caleches and broughams, and swarms of small private one-horse droschkies. Every employ 6 of a decent grade in the Tchinn, every major of police, has his ' one- horse chay.' The great have their carriages with two, four, and six horses ; and when you consider that it is contrary to St. Petersburgian etiquette for a gentleman to drive his own equipage ; that the small merchant or tradesman even, rich enough to possess a droschky of his own, seldom condescends to take the ribbons himself; and lastly, that if not by positive law, at least by commonly recognised and strictly observed custom, no coachman whatsoever, save those who act as whips to foreign ambassadors, are allowed to depart from the old Russian costume, you may imagine how nume- rous the wearers of the low-crowned hat and caftans are in St. Petersburg. Here is the portrait of the Ischvostchik in his habit as he lives. He is a brawny square-built fellow, with a broad bully-beef face, fair curly hair cropped round his head in the workhouse-basin fashion, blue eyes, and a bushy beard. I have seen some specimens of carroty whiskers, too, among the Ischvostchiks, that would do honour to the bar of England. His face is freckled and puckered into queer wrinkles, partly by constant ex- 108 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. posure to wind and weather, torrid heat and iron frost ; partly from the immoderate use of his beloved vapour- bath. The proverb tells us that there are more ways of killing a dog than hanging him so there are more ways of bathing in Russia than the way that we occi- dental people usually bathe the way leaning towards cleanliness, which is next to godliness. I cannot divest myself (from what I have seen) of the impression that the Russian homme du peuple is considerably dirtier after taking a bath than previous to that ablution. But I am launching into so vast and interesting a topic that I must be cautious, and must return to the Isch- vostchik. His hands and feet are of tremendous size : he is strong, active, agile ; and his capacity for endurance of hardships is almost incredible. He wears invariably a long caftan or coat, tight in the waist and loose in the skirts, of dark-blue or grass-green cloth or serge, not by any means of coarse materials, and, if he be a well-to-do Ischvostchik, edged with two narrow rows of black vel vet. This garment is neither single breasted nor double breasted it is rather back breasted, the right lappel extending obliquely across the left breast to beneath the armpit. Under these arms, too, and again if his Ichvostchikship be prosperous, he has a row of sugar-loaf buttons, sometimes silvery, more fre- quently coppery, but never buttoning anything, and serving no earthly purpose that I am aware of. This caftan is in winter replaced by the touloupe, or sheep- skin coat, to which 1 have previously alluded, and to which I give warning I shall have to call attention, many a time and oft, in the progress of this volume. Under the caftan or touloupe exists, perhaps, a shirt (but that is not by any means to be assumed as an in- variable fact), and certainly, suspended by a ribbon, a little cross in brass, or a medal of St. Nicola'i, St. George, St. Serge, St. Alexander Nevsky, or some THE DROSCHKY. 109 other equally revered and thoroughly Russian saint. * Few sorrows had she of her own my hope, my joy, my Genevieve/ and few other garments of his own (though he has sorrows enough) has my Ischvostchik. A pair of baggy galligaskins, blue or pink striped, heavy bucket boots well greased, and he is nearly complete. Nay, let me not omit one little ornament wherewith he sacrifices to the Graces. This is his sash or girdle, which is twisted tightly round his waist. It always has been, in the beginning, dyed in the brightest and most staring hues ; sometimes it has been of gold and silver brocade, and silk of scarlet and of blue ; but it is most frequently, and when offered to the view of you, the fare, encircling the loins of the Ischvostchik, a rag a mere discoloured rag, greasy, dirty, frayed, and crumpled. The Ischvostchik has a brass badge with the number of his vehicle, and an intolerable quantity of Sclavonic verbiage in relief ; and this badge is placed on his back, so that you may study it, and make sure of your Ischvostchik, if you have a spite against him. This is the Ischvostchik who, with his beard and blue coat, his boots and breeches, his once scarlet girdle, his brass badge in the wrong place ; his diminutive hat (decorated sometimes with buckles, sometimes with artificial roses, sometimes with medallions of saints) ; his dirt, his wretchedness, his picturesqueness, and his litter brutishness looks like the distempered recollec- tion of a bluecoat boy, and the nightmare of a beef- eater, mingled with a delirium-tremens' hallucination of the Guildhall Gog transformed into Japhet in the Noah's Ark. VI. THE DROSCHKY. THE Ischvostchik is not necessarily an adult. Though many of the class are men advanced in years, with beards quite snowy and venerable to look at (terrible 110 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. old rogues are these to cheat), there are, on the other hand, numerous droschky-drivers who are lads nay, mere children. It is desperately ludicrous to see a brat, some half-score years old, in full Ischvostchik accoutrement ; for they will not bate an inch of the time-honoured costume ; and adhere rigidly to the long caftan and the gaudy sash. As large men's size appears to be the only pattern recognised for Isch- vostchik boots and hats in Russia, the diminutive heads and spare little legs of these juvenile drivers are lost in a forest of felt and an abyss of boot-leather. I can recall now more than one of those little pale, weazened, frightened faces bonneted in a big hat, precisely like the man who is taking his wife's hand in that strange mirror picture of John Van Eyck's, in the National Gallery the Alpha and Omega of art mechanism, as it seems to me ; for if Van Eyck were the inventor of oil-painting, he has surely in this dawn-picture at- tained the highest degree of perfection in the nicety of manipulation to which that vehicle lends itself. A plague on John Van Eyck, that he should make me unmindful of my Ischvostchik ! I want an excuse, too, for returning to him, for I have something to say about the vehicle he gains his livelihood by driving the Droschky. There is the same amount of despair- ing uncertainty prevalent concerning the orthography of this attelage in plain English, a one-horse shay as about its conductor. In half-a-dozen books and prints I find Droschky spelt in as many different ways : it appears as Droschka, Droski, Drotchki, Droskoi, and Drusschka; I am perfectly ignorant as to the proper method of writing the word ; but I have elected Droschky as the most generally accepted, and I intend to abide by it. The real Russian, or Moscow droschky, is simply a cloth-covered bench upon clumsy C springs on four wheels, with a little perch in front, which the driver THE DROSCHKY. Ill bestrides. You, the passenger, may seat yourself astride, or sideways, on the bench. It may perhaps serve to give a more definite and pictorial idea of the droschky, if I describe it as a combination of elongated side-saddle (such as are provided for the rising gene- ration, and endured by long-suffering donkeys in the vicinity of the Spaniards Tavern at Hampstead), and an Irish outside car. The abominable jolting, dirt, and discomfort of the whole crazy vehicle, forcibly recall, too, that Hibernian institution. There is a leathern paracrotte on either side, to prevent the mud from the wheels flying up into your face, and the bases of these paracrottes serve as steps to mount, and a slight protection in the way of footing against your tumbling out of the ramshackle concern into the mud : but the imbecility, or malevolence of the droschky-builder has added a tin, or pewter covering for this meagre flooring, and as your bones are being rattled over the Russian stones, your feet keep up an incessant and involuntary skating shuffle on this accursed pewter pavement. There is nothing to hold on by, save the driver, and a sort of saddle-pummel turned the wrong way, at the hinder end of the bench ; the droschky rocks from side to side, threatening to tip over altogether at every moment. You mutter, you pray, you perspire ; your hooked fingers seek little inequalities of the bench to grasp at, as Claude Frollo tried to claw at the stone copings when he fell from the tower of Notre Dame ; you are jolted, you are bumped, you are scarified; you are dislocated ; and, all this while, your feet are keeping up the diabolical goose-step on the pewter beneath. Anathema, Maranatha ! if there be a strong north wind blowing (Boreas has his own way, even in the height of summer, in Petersburg), and your hat be tempted to desert your head, and go out on the loose ! There is such a human, or, perhaps, fiendish perversity in hats, when they blow off such a mean, 112 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. malignant, cruel, and capricious persistence in rolling away, and baffling you that I can scarcely refrain from shaking my fist at my vagrant head-covering while I am running after it, and swearing at it when I capture it ; and punching its head well before I re- settle it on my own. But what are you to do if your hat flies off in a droschky ? You daren't jump out : sudden death lies that way. The driver will see you at Nishi-Novgorod before he will descend to recover it ; although he has not the slightest shame in asking you to get down to pick up his whip. All you can do is to shut your eyes, tie a pocket-handkerchief over your head, and buy a new hat ; which, by the way, will cost you, for a very ordinary one, ten silver roubles a guinea and a half. As to stopping the droschky, get- ting down, and chasing the fugitive that might be done in England ; but not here. It seems almost as difficult to pull up a droschky as a railway train. The wheels would seem to be greased to such a terrific extent, that they run or jolt on of their own accord ; and two hundred yards' notice is the least you can, in any conscience, give your Ischvostchik, if you want him to ' stoi.' Meantime, with that execrable north wind, where would your hat be ? In the Neva, or half- way to the Lake of Ladoga. When the Scythians (was it the Scythians, by the way ?) were first made acquainted with horses, we read that their young men desirous of taking lessons in equitation were, to prevent accidents, bound to their mettlesome steeds with cords. I think it would be expedient, when a foreigner takes his first airing in a droschky, to tie him to the bench, or at least to nail his coat-tails thereto. The born Russians, curiously, seem to prefer these perilous vehicles to the more com- fortable droschkies. They seldom avail themselves of the facility of bestriding the narrow bench, Colossus- like, but sit jauntily sideways, tapping that deadly THE DROSCHKY. US pewter with their boot-tips as confidently and securely as the Amazons who scour through the tan at the Hippodrome on bare-backed steeds. Ladies, even, frequently patronise these breakers on wheels. It is a sight to see their skirts spreading their white bosoms to the gale, like ships' canvas ; a prettier sight to watch their dainty feet pit-a-patting on that pewter of peril I have before denounced. When a lady and gentle- man mount one of these droschkies, and are, I pre- sume, on tolerably brotherly and sisterly terms, it seems to be accepted as a piece of cosy etiquette for the lady to sit in the gentleman's lap. While waiting at a house-door for a fare engaged therein, or at any other time that he is not absolutely compelled to be driving, the Ischvostchik has a habit of abandoning the splash-board, and reclining at full length on his back on the droschky bench, there to snore peacefully, oblivious of slavery, unmindful of the stick. To the full length of his trunk would be perhaps a more correct expression, for the bench is only long enough for his body down to the knees ; and his big-booted legs dangle comfortably down among the wheels. He will sleep here, in the sun, in the rain, in weather hot and cold ; and, were it not for casual passengers and the ever-pursuing police soldier, he would so sleep, I believe, till Doomsday. There is one inconvenience to the future occupant of the dros- chky in this ; that, inasmuch as it is pleasant, in a hotel, to have your bed warmed, there are differences of opinion as to the comfort of having your seat warmed vicariously : especially when the animated warming-pan is a Russian and an Ischvostchik, and, and well, the truth must out ragged, dirty, greasy, and swarming with vermin. I know that I am sinning grievously against good manners in barely hinting at the existence of such things ; but I might as well attempt to write a book I 114 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. on Venice without mentioning the canals, as to chronicle Russian manners and customs without touching ever so delicately on the topic of the domestic animalcule of the empire. There is a little animal friendly to man, and signifying, I have been given to understand, love, whose existence is very properly ignored in the select circles of refined England, but who is as familiar in good society at Petersburg as the lively flea is at Pera. It was my fortune, during a portion of my stay in Russia, to occupy an apartment in a very grand house on the Nevskoi Perspective, nearly opposite the -cathedral of Our Lady of Kasan. The house itself had an ecclesiastical title, being the Dom-Petripavlos- ko'i, or house of St. Peter and St. Paul, and was an appanage of that wealthy church. We had a marble staircase to our house, imitation scagliola columns, and panels painted quite beautifully with Cupids and Venuses. A Russian lady of high rank occupied a .suite of apartments on the same floor; and, late one night, when I was about retiring to rest, her well-born excellency (I used to call her the Queen of Sheba, she ivas so stately) condescended to order her body-servant to tap at my door, and tell me that the Barynia desired to speak with me. I accordingly had an interview with her at the door of her apartment, she being also about to retire for the night. She had something to show me, she said. Russian ladies always have some- thing to show you a bracelet, a caricature, a tame lizard, a musical box, a fly in amber, or some novelty of that description but this was simply a remarkably handsome black velvet mantle, with two falls of rich black lace to it. I knew that it was new, and had come home only that afternoon from Madame Zoe Falcon's, the court modiste in the Mala Millionne ; so, expecting that the countess, with the elegant caprice in which her distinguished position gave her a right to indulge, wished to have, even at two o'clock in the morning, THE DROSCHKY. 115 the opinion 'of an Anglisky upon her mantle, I said critically that it was very pretty, whereupon, a taper finger was pointed to a particular spot on the mantle, and a silvery voice said, ' Regardez /' I did regarder, -and, on my honour, I saw strolling leisurely over the black velvet, gravely, but confidently, majestic but 'unaffected, his white top-coat on, his hat on one side, .his umbrella under his arm (if I 'may be permitted to use such metaphorical expressions), as fine a LOUSE as ever was seen in St. Giles's. I bowed and withdrew. I must explain that I had previously expressed my- self somewhat sceptically to this lady respecting the animalcular phenomena of Russia ; for I had been stopping in a German hotel at Wassily-Ostrow, where the bedrooms were scrupulously clean ; and it must be .also said that the lady in question, though a Russian subject, and married to an officer in the guards, had been born and educated in western Europe. Had she been a native Russian, little account would she have taken of such a true-born subject of the Czar at that late hour, I ween. Although the violent and eccentric oscillations of a single-bodied droschky undoubtedly conduce to a frame of mind which is a sovereign cure for hypochondriasis, yet the drawbacks to its advantages (the last one espe- cially) are so fearful, that I question whether it be worth while to undergo so much suffering as the transi- tion from a state of chronic melancholy to one of raving madness. In the provinces, I am sorry to write it, it is ofttimes but Hobson's choice this or none j but in St. Petersburg (and I suppose in coronation' time at Moscow) there is no lack of double-bodied droschkies, in which you may ride without any very im- minent danger of a dislocation of the arm, and a com- pound fracture of the thigh, or so, per verst. The form of the double-bodied droschky, though not very familiar to our Long Acre carriage architects, is well I 2 116 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. known in France. The inhabitants of the Rue du Jew de Paume, at Versailles, must be well acquainted with it ; for therein it was whilome (and is so still, I hope) the custom of the great French painter, Monsieur HORACE. VERNET, to ride in a trim coquettish little droschky, presented to him by the Czar Nicholas. In his latter days, his imperial friend did not like Horace quite so- much : the impudent artist having been misguided enough to publish some letters which had the misfor- tune to be true, and not quite favourable to the impe- rial regime. This droschky was, it need scarcely be- said, a gem of its kind a model Attelage Russe. The horse likewise a present from the emperor was a superb coal-black etalon of the Ukraine ; and to com- plete the turn-out, the driver was in genuine Ischvostchik costume in hat, boots, and caftan complete. I want to see the double-bodied droschky in London, Isch- vostchik and all. I am tired of tandems, dog-carts,, mail-phaetons, and hooded cabriolets, with tall horses and short tigers. What could there be more spicy down the road than a droschky, sparkling, shining,, faultless to a nut, a rivet, as our matchless English coachbuilders only know how to turn out an equipage ;. with a fast-trotting mare in the shafts, and a driver with a bushy beard, a sky-blue caftan, shiny boots* and an Ischvostchik's hat? I think John Coachman would not object to growing a beard and wearing a caftan for a reasonable advance on his wages. I won- der if any of the stately English hidalgos I saw ju&t before I left Russia if any of those ethereally-born Secretaries of Legation, and unpaid attaches will bring home a droschky from the land of the Russ, or, on their return, order one from Laurie or Houlditch. There are, perhaps, two slight obstacles to the natu- ralisation of the droschky in England. In the first place, you couldn't have the Ischvostchik thrashed if he didn't drive well ; in the next, the English gentleman is in- THE DROSCHKY. 117 -nately a driving animal. He likes to take the ribbons .himself, while his groom sits beside with folded arms. In Russia, the case is precisely contrary. The Rus- sian moujik is almost born a coachman ; at all events, he begins to drive in his tenderest childhood. The Russian gentleman scarcely ever touches a pair of reins. The work is too hard ; besides, is there not Ivan Ivan- ovitch to take the trouble off our hands ? In St. Petersburg, it is entirely contrary to etiquette for a gentleman to be seen driving his own equipage ; and I have no doubt that any gentleman so sinning would draw upon himself a reprimand from the emperor, or, at least, the evil eye of the police. This extraordi- nary government seems almost to be jealous of private -equestrianism. In no capital in Europe do you see such a woeful paucity of cavaliers as in St. Petersburg. I do not speak of the city proper, in which the execrable pavement is sufficient to ruin any horse's feet ; but in ihe environs, where there are good roads, you seldom meet any persons in plain clothes on horseback. Either it fc is not bon-ton to ride in mufti (and, to be candid, there are very few gentlemen, save the members of the corps diplomatique, who ever appear out of uniform), or to have a horse to oneself, and to ride it, is con- .sidered in certain quarters an encroachment on the im- perial prerogative of a. cavalry force ; or and this I am led shrewdly to suspect is the real reason the Rus- sians are bad horsemen, and don't care about equitation -except upon compulsion. Be good enough to bear in mind that the Tatars and Cossacks, who live almost entirely on horseback, are not Russians. The Russian cavalry soldiers sit their horses in the clumsiest, pain- fullest manner you can conceive ; and though they have the vastest riding-schools, and the most awfully severe manege to be found anywhere, the Russian cavalry are notoriously inefficient as troopers : they are grenadiers on horseback, nothing more. They can do everything, 118 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. and more than western soldiers, in the way of manoeu- vring, curveting, and caracoling, of course they MUST do it, or the omnipotent Stick will know the reason why ; but, in actual warfare, it is astonishing how our friend the Cossack goes up to premium, and how the dragoon goes down to discount. The peasants of Little Russia make tolerably good troopers ; which is difficult to understand, seeing that with them horses are scarce,, and their principal experience in riding and driving is confined to oxen ; but the Eussian proper is almost as much a stranger to a horse's back as a man-o'-war's man is, though he, the Russian, has a natural genius- for droschky-driving. And this I write after having seen a review of the Chevalier Guards, who, if size and magnificence of appointment are to be considered as a test of capacity, are the twelve hundred finest men upon the twelve hundred finest horses in the world. Now and then but it is a case of extreme rarity of occurrence- you see a Grentilhomme Russe driving- (himself) a feeble imitation of an English dog-cart, in a leafy road on one of the pretty islands in the Neva. Every Russian, of whatever rank he may be from the sun, moon, and starred general, to the filthy moujik;, from the white-headed octogenarian to the sallow baby in the nurse's arms every child of the Czar has a worn, pinched, dolorous, uneasy expression in his coun- tenance, as if his boots hurt him, or as if he had a can- kerworm somewhere, or a scarlet letter burnt into his breast, like the Rev. Mr. Dimsdale. They are not good to look at Russian faces. People say that it is the climate, or the abuse of vapour-baths, that gives them that unlovely look. But a bad climate won't prevent you from looking your neighbour in the face ; two vapour-baths per week won't pull down the corners of your mouth, and give you the physiognomy of a convict who would like to get into the chaplain's good graces. No. It is the Valley of the Shadow of Stick THE DROSGHKY. Hi) through which these men are continually passing, that casts this evil hang-dog cloud upon them. Well, imagine the Grentilhomme Russe in his dog-cart with four reins, no whip, and that rueful visage I have spoken of. By his side is a slave-servant, evidently shaved against his will, and who is of the same (hirsute) opinion still ; for bristles are obstinately starting out of forbidden corners. He has a shabby blue cap with a faded gold-lace band, and a livery that does not come within the wildest possibility of having been made for him. He tries mournfully to fold his arms, with those paws covered with dirty Berlin gloves, and he makes superhuman efforts not to fall asleep. Master and man are clearly in a wrong position. The horse (a first-rate one, with a flowing mane and tail) evidently despises the whole concern, and kicks his heels up at it. The dog-cart is badly built, the wheels are out of balance, and the paint is dingy. They never seem to wash Russian carriages ; I have lived over a -mews, and ought to know. This Gentilhomme Russe in the dog- cart is about as mournful a sight as is to be seen any- where, even in Russia. But, when the Russians are sensible enough to abandon imitation, and to stand or fall by their own native equipages, they can make a brave show. Of little, private, double-bodied droschkies, there are swarms ; and in some of these you will see horses worth from seven to twelve hundred silver roubles each. Many a puny cornet in the guards, too, has his caleche lined with moire-antique,and drawn by two splendid, black, Ukraine horses. I may observe that the horses never wear blinkers, and that, though full of mettle, they are very little addicted to shying. The harness is quite peculiar and Russian, consisting of a purple net of leather-work profusely spangled with small discs of silver. Only some of the court carriages are drawn by horses harnessed in the English manner. 120 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. Pretty as their own caparisons are, the Russians sigh for foreign fashions ; and extravagant prices are given for a set of English harness. In the native harness there seem to be a good many unnecessary straps and tassels ; but the backs of the horses are left almost entirely free, which has a very picturesque and wild horse of the prairie sort of effect. Coal black is the favourite hue ; next, grey. With all horses, the sen- sible custom is observed of allowing the manes and tails to grow ; and the consequence is, that the animals look about thrice as handsome and as noble (bless their honest hearts!) as the be-ratted, be-greyhounded steeds we see at home. The coachman of the Princess Schiliapoff (or any other princess you like to find a name for), the con- ductor of those coal-black steeds (the Schiliapoff has twenty-five hundred serfs, and half the Ogurzi Per- spective belongs to her), is own brother to the ragged, dirty Ischvostchik. Nor, though he is coachman to a princess, is his social position one whit better than that of Ivan Ivanovitch, sprawling on his back on the droschky bench. His caftan is made of superfine broad- cloth, sometimes of velvet, slashed at the back and sides with embroidery, as if he had been knouted with a golden whip ; his hat is of the shiniest nap, has a velvet band, a silver buckle, and is decorated with a bunch of rosy ribbons, a bouquet of artificial flowers, or a peacock's feather. He has a starched white neck- cloth, buckskin gloves, rings in his ears ; his hair is scrupulously cut, and his beard is bushy, well trimmed, oiled, and curled. He has a sash radiant with bright colours, and the top of a crimson silk shirt just asserts itself above his caftan. It is probable that he some- times gets meat to eat, and that he has decent sleeping accommodation in the stables, along with the horses. But he is a SLAVE, body and bones. The Princess Schiliapoff may sell him to-morrow if she have a mind THE DROSCHKY. 121 [to those who have an idea that Russian serfs cannot be sold away from the soil, I beg to recall Mr. Fox's recommendation to Napoleon Bonaparte on the assas- sination question, * Put all that nonsense out of your head.'] The princess may send him to the police, and have him beaten like a sack if he take a wrong turning or pull up at the wrong milliner's shop : the princess's majordomo may, and does, kick, cuff, and pull his hair, whenever he has a mind that way. The princess may, if he have offended her beyond the power of stick to atone for, send him as an exile to Siberia, or into the ranks of the army as a soldier. There are many noble families who pride themselves on having hand- some men as coachmen; there are others, like Sir Roger de Coverley, who like to have old men to drive them. I have seen some of this latter category, quite patriarchs of the box, venerable, snowy-bearded old men, that might have sat for portraits of the Apostles in the Cartoons. It is pleasant, is it not, to be six feet high and as handsome as Dunois, and to be sold to pay a gambling debt ? To be sixty years of age, and have a white head, and grandchildren, and to be scourged with birch rods like a schoolboy ? And these good people are WHITE, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, White, ma'am ! The Russian imperial court is a court ; by which, on the principle of coals being coals, I mean that the Czar has always in his train a vast number of grand dignitaries of the household, and bond fide courtiers, constantly attendant on and resident with him. These courtly personages, when they drive about in carriages, are permitted to have a footman on the box beside the coachman. This John Thomas, or Ivan Tomasovitch, to be strictly Russian, is unpowdered and un whiskered. There is no medium in a serf's shaving here ; he is either full-bearded or gaol-cropped. His shirt and in- deed lower habiliments are doubtful, for he wears 122 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. over all, summer and winter a huge cloak descending to his heels, of the very brightest scarlet, a cloak with a deep cape and a high collar.* The edges of this garment are passemented with broad bands of gold embroidered with countless double eagles on black velvet, and these have such a weird and batlike, not to say demoniac, effect, that the Muscovite flunkey clad in this flaming garment and with an immense cocked- hat stuck fore and aft on his semi-shaven head, bears a fantastic resemblance to an India-house beadle, of whom the holy inquisition has fallen foul, and who, shorn of his staff, but with his red cloak converted into a San Benito, is riding to an auto da fe in his master's carriage. Some general officers have soldier- footmen, who sit in the rumble of the caleche in the military grey cloak and spiked helmet. The ambas- sadors have their chasseurs plumed, braided, and cou- teau-de-chassed ; but with these exceptions, the outward and visible sign of the flunkey is wanting in Peters- burgh. Yet everybody keeps a carriage who can afford it; and many do so who can't. I was very nearly having half a private droschky myself ; the temptation was so great, the horses so good, the coachman so- skilful, the difficulties of pedestrianism so great, the public conveyances so abominably bad. As I have remarked, the majority of carriage-keepers don't take footmen out with them. I have seen the great Prince Dolgorouki, the chief of the gendarmerie and secret police, the high and mighty wooden-stick in waiting, at whose very name I tremble still, step out of one of * The Russians are extravagantly fond of red. That a thing is red, implies with them that it is beautiful ; indeed, they have but one word (preknasse) to express both redness and beauty. The favourite Russian flower is the rose ; though, alas ! that has far more frequently to be admired in paper or wax than in actual existence. A crimson petticoat is the holiday dress of a peasant girl : and to have a red shirt is one of the dearest objects of a Moujik's ambition. THE DROSCHKY. 123 those modest little broughams called ' pill-boxes,' open it, and close the door as if he knew not what a footman was, and walk up-stairs to the second-floor of a lodging- house, with his stars, his ribbons, his helmet, his sword, his spurs, unflunkeyed and unannounced. Fall not, how- ever, into the obvious error of imagining that Ivan Tomasovitch the flunkey lacks in Russian households ; within doors he swarms, multiplies himself orientally and indefinitely; but, out of doors, Nou* Autres do- without him. Two words more, and I have done with the equi- pages of the great. Although there are probably na people on earth that attach so much importance ta honorific distinctions, caste, costumes, and 'sun, moon,., and stars ' decorations as the Russians, their carriage- panels are singularly free from the boastful imbe- cilities of that sham heraldry and harlequinading patchwork which some of us in the west throw like particoloured snuff into the eyes of the world to prove our high descent. And, goodness knows, the Russian nobility are barbarically well-born enough. They have- plenty of heraldic kaleidoscope-work at home ; but they keep it, like their servants, for grand occasions. For ordinary wear, a plain coronet on the panel, or more frequently still the simple initials of the occu- pant, are thought sufficient for a prince's carriage. A last word. Since my return to Western Europe I have noticed that the dear and delightful sex who- share our joys and double our woes I mean, of course,, the Ladies ! have adopted a new, marvellous, and most eccentric fashion in wearing-apparel. I allude to the cunning machines, of a balloon form, composed of crinoline, whalebone, and steel, called I have heard sousjupes bouffantes, and which I conjecture the fair creatures wear underneath their dresses to c give them that swaying, staggering nether appearance, which is so much admired by milliners and which I can com- / 124 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. pare to nothing so closely as the Great Bell of Bow in a gale of wind, and far gone in the dropsy. What feave the sousjupes louffantes to do with the coachmen of the Russian boyards ? you will ask. This. For a yery swell coachman, there is nothing thought more elegant and distinguished than a most exaggerated bustle. The unhappy wretches are made to waspicate their waists with their sashes ; and, all around in a hundred plaits/extend the skirts of their caftans. What species of under-garments they wear, or what mecha- nical means they adopt to innate their skirts, I know not ; but they have exactly the same Tombola appear- ance as our fashionable ladies. Isn't it charming, ladies? Only twenty years since, you borrowed a fashion from the Hottentot Venus, and now skirts are worn a la Movjik Russe. There are some old Russian families who are yet sufficiently attached to ancient, pigtail observances, as to drive four horses to their carriages. The leaders .are generally a long way ahead ; there is a prevailing looseness in the way of traces ; and the postilion, if any, sternly repudiates the bare idea of a jacket with a two-inch tail, and adheres to the orthodox caftan ; a portion of whose skirts he tucks into his bucket-boots along with his galligaskins. Caftan and boots and foreeches, breeches, boots and caftan, bushy beard and low-crowned hat ! Dear reader, how often shall I have to reiterate these words how long will it be before jou tire of them ? There are sixty-five millions of people in this Valley of the Drybones ; but they are all alike in their degree. The Russian people are printed, and there are thousands of impressions of fudy officers struck in colours, gilt and tinselled like r. Parks's characters (those that cost three-and-six- pence) ; and there are millions of humble moujiks and ischvostchiks, roughly pulled and hastily daubed only .a penny plain and twopence coloured. ( 125 ) VII. THE CZAR'S HIGHWAY* 1 LET me,' said somebody who knew what he was saying, e write the ballads of a people, and he may write their history who 'will.' If the Czar of all the Russias would only allow me to make his roads for him, the great problem of the way out of barbarism in his empire could be solved by a child. There is no* such civiliser as a good road. With even an imperfect highway disappear highwaymen, crawling beggars, dirty inns and extortionate charges, lazy habits, ignorance, and waste lands. Our shops, our horses' legs, our boots, our hearts, have all benefited by the introduc- tion of Macadam ; and the eighteen modern improve- ments mentioned by Sydney Smith can all be traced,, directly or indirectly, to the time when it fortuitously occurred to the astute Scotchman (where are his Life- and Times, in twenty volumes?) to strew our path with pulverised granite. I am convinced that our American cousins would be much less addicted to- bowie-kniving, revolvering, expectorating, gin-slinging,, and cow-hiding the members of their legislature, if they would only substitute trim, level, hedge-lined highways for the vile corduroy roads and railway tracks thrown slovenly anyhow, like the clothes of a drunken man, across prairies, morasses, half-cleared forests, and dried-up water-courses, by means of which they accomplish their thousand-mile trips in search of dollars. What a dreadful, though delightful place was Paris when I knew it first ! foul gutters rolling their mud-cataracts between rows of palaces ; suburban roads alternating between dust-heaps and sloughs of despond ;. and boulevards so badly paved, that the out-patienced population were continually tearing them up to make barricades with. There have been no emeutes in Paris- since boulevards were macadamised. Much of the 126 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. Ribbonism, r landlord-stalking from behind hedges, and Skibbereen starvation of Ireland, may be attributed to the baleful roads of bygone days, which were full of holes, known as curiosities, and on which the mile- stones were so capriciously distributed, that whereas every squire (of the right way of thinking) had one on each side of his park-gates, unpopular localities, and villages where tithe-proctors dwelt, were left without milestones altogether. Who was it that was chief of the staff to murderous Major-General Mismanagement in the Crimea? The hideous roads from Balaclava to the front. When the railway navvy took up the spade, the soldier's grave-digger laid his mattock down. What is it that impresses us mostly with the grandeur of the civilisation of that stern, strong people, who came to Britain with Caesar, but the highways they made, whose foundations serve even now for our great thorough- fares, and which remain imperishable monuments of their wisdom and industry the wonderful Roman roads. And flout nor scout me none for uttering truisms con- cerning roads in their relation to civilisation ; for Paris is rapidly surpassing our vaunted London City in ex- cellence of pavement. New Street, Covent Garden, is in a bad way ; the Victoria Road, Kensington, leaves much to be desired ; and the Commissioners of Turn- pike Trusts, all over the country, want looking after sharply. There is need for us to have sermons on the better care of the stones. If we don't keep a bright look-out for our pavements, we shall infallibly retro- grade decay as a nation ; and M. Ledru Eollin will rejoice. If we are unmindful of the Queen's highway, we shall inevitably come to clip the Queen's English, and break the Queen's peace, and to the dark ages. It behoves us especially to be watchful, for our pro- tectors never forget to collect the Queen's taxes, roads or no roads. The Czar's highway, which is literally his for every- THE CZAR'S HIGHWAY. 127 thing in the empire, movable and immovable, animated and inanimated, is his own private and personal pro- perty* is the worst highway that was ever seen. The Czar's highway in his two metropolises, in his provinces and his country towns, from north to south from Karlsgammen, in Lapland, to Saratchikovskaia, in Astrakhan is the most abominable I can't call it a corduroy road, or a kidney-potato road, or a sharp- shingle road the most miserable sackcloth-and-ashes road that was ever invented to delight self-mortifying pilgrims, to break postilions' constitutions, horses' backs, and travellers' hearts. There is the iron road, as all men know, from Petersburg to Pawlosky, and also from the northern capital to Moscow. This last is kept in order by an American company, and is a road ; but you understand that there can be railways and railways, and even out of rails and sleepers can Czarish men make iron roads to scourge, and make a difficult Avernus to us, withal. From Petersburg to Warsaw there is a chaussee, or road, which, by a fiction as beautiful and fantastic as a poem by Mr. Tennyson, is said to be macadamised. It is rather O'Adamised : there is a great deal more Irish gammon than Scotch granite about it ; but it is perpetually being re-mended at the express command of the emperor. When he travels over it, the highway is, I dare say, tolerable ; for the autocrat being naturally born to have the best of everything, his subjects have an extraordinary genius for supplying him with the very best and the very best it is for the time being. When the Czar is coming, rotting rows of cabins * I remember once asking a Russian gentleman (not, however, with the slightest expectation of receiving a direct answer) the amount of the Imperial Civil List. He scarcely seemed to under- stand my question at first ; but he replied, eventually, that his Majesty 'affected to himself a certain gigantic sum (I forget how many million silver roubles, for I am boldly bankrupt in statistics) ; but ' Que voulez-vous,' he added, ' avec une Liste Civile ? TOUT appartient au Czar, et il prend ce qu'il veut !' 128 A JOUKXEY DUE XORTH. change into smiling villages, bare poles into flowering shrubs, rags into velvet gowns, Polyphemus becomes Narcissus ; blind men see and lame men walk, so to speak. The Czar can turn anything except his satraps* hearts. Of the provincial highways, and the vehicles that do roll upon them kibitkas, telegas, and tarantasses, I shall have to speak hereafter. My object in this chapter is to give some idea of the pavement of St. Petersburg, of which hitherto you have had but the glimpse of a notion in the words I have set down about ischvostchiks and concerning droschkies. I have come, by the way, on a new reading of the former multi-named individual. The correspondent of a Belgian newspaper calls him. by the startling appellation of Ishwoschisky. I am not far from thinking that his real name must be Ishmael ^ for every man's (writing) hand is against him, and it is by no means uncommon for his hand to be against every man. There is a village in Carelia whose sons- almost exclusively pursue the ischvostchik calling. There are a good many of them in St. Petersburg,, where they have a high reputation as skilful drivers,, and not quite so cheerful a renown for being all mur- derers. 'Gin an ischvostchik of this celebrated village meet with a drunken or a sleepy fare on a dark night, it is even betting that he will give the exact reading of the'popular Scotch ditty, and make the fare into a ' body*" before he has long been coming through the ride. Many persons endeavour to explain the badness of the St. Petersburg pavement by the severity of the climate, and the treacherous nature of the soil on which the city is built. The whole place is, it must be con- fessed, a double-dammed Amsterdam ; and it has often been with feelings akin to horror that I have peeped into a hole on the magnificent Nevsko'i, when the work- men were mending the pavement which they are in- cessantly occupied in doing in some part of the street THE CZAR'S HIGHWAY. 129 during the summer months. At a distance of perhaps two feet from the granite slabs of the footpath, or the .hexagonal wooden blocks of the roadway, you see the ominous rotting of wooden logs and piles on which the whole city is built, and at a dreadfully short distance from them you see the WATER not so muddy, not so slimy, but the real water of the Neva. St. Petersburg has been robbed from the river. Its palaces float rather than stand. The Neva, like a haughty courtezan, bears the splended sham upon her breast like a scarlet letter, or the costly gift of a lover she hates. She revolted in eighteen hundred and twenty-four, she revolted in 'thirty-nine, she revolted in 'forty-two, and tried to wash the splendid stigma away in floods of passionate tears. She will cast it away from her some day, utterly and for ever. The city is an untenable position now, like Naples. It must go some day by the board. Isaac's church and Winter Palace Peter the Great's hut and Alexander's monolith will be no more heard of, and will return to the Mud, their father, and the Ooze, their mother. In the Nevsko'i Perspective and the two Morska'ias, violent efforts have been made for years past, in order to procure something like a decent pavement. There is a broad foot-way on either side, composed of large slabs ; but their uncertain foundation causes them now to settle one way, now on the other, now to present a series of the most extraordinary angular undulations. It is as though you were walking on the sloping roofs of houses, which had sunk into the boggy soil up to frieze and architrave ; and this delusion is aggravated by the bornes, or corner-posts, set up to prevent carriages encroaching on the foot-pavement, which bornes, being little stumps of wood, just peering from the earth at every half-dozen yards, or so, look like the tops of lamp- posts. But the roof-scrambling effect is most impres- sive during the frequent occasions in the summer K 130 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. months, when the streets of St. Petersburg are illu- minated. Most of the birthdays of the members of the Imperial family fall between May' and August ; and each scion of the illustrious house of Romanoff has an illumination to himself, by right of birth. You, who are yet fresh from the graphic and glowing description of the coronation illuminations at Moscow, by the Man who fought the Battle of England in the Crimea, better and more bravely than the whole brilliant staff who* have been decorated with the order of the bath, and who^ would have gone there, for head-shaving purposes, long, ago, if people had their due doubtless, expect a very? splendid account from me of illuminations at St. Peters- burg. But it was my fortune to see Russia, not in its gala uniform, with its face washed, and all its orders on : but Russia in its shirt-sleeves (with its caftan off, leaving the vexed question of shirts or no shirts in abeyance, would perhaps be nearer the mark), Russia at-home, and not expecting visitors till September Russia just recovering its breath, raw, bruised, ex- hausted, torn, begrimed from a long and bloody conflict. The best illuminations, then, that met my gaze, were on the birth-night of the Empress-mother, and consisted of an indefinite quantity of earthen pots, filled with train-oil, or fat, and furnished with wicks of tow. These being set alight were placed in rows along the pave- ment, one to each little wooden post, or borne. It was the antediluvian French system of lampions, in fact, smelling abominably, smoking suffocatingly, but making a brave blaze notwithstanding, and, in the almost in- terminable perspective of streets and quays, producing a very curious and ghastly effect. At midnight you could walk a hundred yards on the Nevsko'i, without finding a single soul abroad to look at the illuminations : at midnight it was broad daylight. The windows were all blind and headless ; what distant droschkies there may have been, made not the thought of a noise on the THE CZAR'S HIGHWAY. 131 wooden pavement ; and these rows of blinking, flaring grease-pots resting on the earth, led you to fancy that you were walking on the roofs of a city of the dead, illuminated by corpse-candles. Take no lame devil with you, though, good student, when you walk these paving- stone house-tops. Bid him unroof, and what will it avail you ? There are no genial kitchens be- neath, no meat-safes before whose wire-gauze outworks armies of rats sit down in silent, hopeless siege ; no cellars sacred to cats and old wine ; no dust-bins, where ravens have their savings-banks, and invest their little economies secretly. There is nothing beneath, but the cold, black ooze of the Neva, which refuses to divulge its secrets, even to devils even to the worsest devil of all, the police. An eminently secretive river is the Neva. Its lips are locked with the ice-key for five months. It tells no tales of the dead men that find their way into it somehow even when the frost is sharpest, and the ice thickest. Swiftly it carries its ugly secrets swiftly, securely, with its remorseless current, to a friend in whom it can confide, and with whom it has done business before the Gulf of Finland. Only, once a-year, when the ice breaks up, the Neva is taken in the fact, and murder will out. As for the gas-lamps on the Czar's highway, they puzzle a stranger in Russia terribly. There is every element of civilisation in St. Petersburg, from Soyer's Relish to the magnetic telegraph ; and, of course, the Nevskoi' and the Morska'ias have their gas-lamps. They are handsome erections in bronze, real or sham, rich in mouldings and metallic foliage. On the quays, the lamp-posts assume a different form. They are great wooden obelisks, like sentry-boxes that have grown too tall, and run to seed, and they are bariole, or smeared over in the most eccentric manner with alter- nate bars of black and white paint. In Western Europe, these inviting spaces would be very speedily K 2 132 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. covered with rainbow-hued placards relating to pills and plays and penny-newspapers ; but I should like to see the bill-sticker bold enough to deface his Imperial Majesty's sentry-box lamp-posts, with his sheet of double-crown and his paste-brush ! This is no place for the famous Paddy Clark, who, being charged before a magistrate at Bow Street, with the offence of defac- ing the august walls of Apsley House with a Reform placard, unblushingly avowed his guilt, and added that he would paste a bill on the Duke of Wellington's back, if he were paid for it. I am afraid that Mr. Clark would very soon be pasting bills beyond the Oural Mountains for the Siberian bears to read, if he were alive, and in Russia ; or, that, if he escaped exile, he would swiftly discover that the Russian police have a way of posting bills on the backs of human houses very plain and legible to the view. They always print, too, in red ink. These black and white lamp-posts, common, by the way, all over Russia, and whose simple and elegant scheme of embellishment is extended to the verst-posts, the sentry-boxes, and the custom-house huts at the frontiers and town-barriers, are an emana- tion from the genius of the beneficent but insane auto- crat, Paul the First ; their peculiar decoration is due to the same imperial maniac, who issued oukases con- cerning shoe-strings, cocked-hats, and ladies' muffs, and whose useful career was prematurely cut short in a certain frowning palace at St. Petersburg, of which I shall have to tell by-and-by. When I see these varie- gated erections, I understand what the meaning is of the mysterious American striped pig. This must have been his colour.* It must in justice be admitted, that though Paul was a roaring madman, there are other countries * Did my reader ever notice the curious fancy that persons not quite right in their minds have for stripes and chequers, or at least for parallel lines ? Martin van Butchell used to ride a striped pony. Isaw a lunatic in Hanwell sit for hours counting and playing with THE CZAR'S HIGHWAY. 133 where the sentry-boxes, at least, are similarly smeared. I happened, lately, to traverse the whole breadth of the miserable kingdom of Hanover, coming from Hamburg ; and for sixty miles the road-side walls, palings, and hedges, were painted in stripes of black and yellow the national Hanoverian colours. I do not like thee, Hanover, thee, thy king, nor coinage. The Hanoverian postmen wear a costume seedily imitative of our General Post-Office employes ; but the scarlet is dingy and the black cockade a most miserable mushroom. It made me mad to see the letter-boxes, and custom-house walls, and railway vans all flourished over with the royal initials G. R., exactly in the fat, florid characters we have seen too much of at home, and surmounted by a bad copy of the English crown. I thought we were well rid of the four Georges for good and all, and here was a fifth flourishing about to vex me. It may be that I looked at Hanover, its black and yellow posts, post- men, and king's initials, with somewhat of a jaundiced eye ; for I had to stop at Hanover three hours in the dead of night, waiting for the express train from Ber- lin, which was behind time, as usual, and crawled into the station at last, like an express funeral. There is the worst beer at Hanover the worst cold veal, the worst waiter but let me go back to the lamp-posts of Petersburg. Bronze on the Nevsko'i ; striped sentry-boxes on the quays ; for second-rate streets, such as the Galernaia- Oulitza, or Great Galley Street, the Podialskeskaia, or Street of the Barbers, more economical lamp-posts are provided, being simply great gibbets of rough wood, to which oil-lamps are hung in chains. There are other streets more remote from the centre of civili- sation, or Nevsko'i, which are obliged to be contented the railings. Many insane persons are fascinated by a chess-board : and any one who has ever had a brain fever will remember tho horrible attractions of a striped wall-paper. 134 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. with ropes slung across from bouse to house, with an oil- lamp dangling in the middle (the old Reverbere plan) ; and there are a great many outlying streets which do without lamps all the year round. But oil, or gas, or neither, all the posts in Petersburg are lampless from the first of May to the first of August in every year. During those three months there is, meteorologically and officially, no night. It sometimes happens, as in this summer last past, that the days draw in much earlier than usual. Towards the end of last July, it was pitch dark at eight o'clock, p.m. The government of the Double Eagle, however, does not condescend to notice these aberrations on the part of the clerk of the weather. The government night, as duly stamped and registered, and sanctified by Imperial oukases, does not commence till nine p.m. on the first of August ; and then, but not a day or hour before, the lamps are lighted. To me, the first sign of gas in the Nevsko'i, after returning from a weary journey, was a beacon of hope and cheerfulness ; but the Russians welcome the gas back with dolorous faces and half-suppressed sighs. Gas is the precursor of the sleety, rainy, sopping autumn, with its fierce gusts of west wind ; gas is the herald, the avdnt-courier, of the awful winter: of oven-like rooms, nose-biting outward temperature, frozen fish, frozen meat, frozen tears, frozen everything. Some Russians will tell you that the winter is the only time to enjoy St. Petersburg. Then there are balls, then Montagnes de Glace, then masquerades, then the Italian opera, then sleighing parties, then champagne suppers. With warm rooms, and plenty of furs, who need mind the winter ? But give a Russian a chance of leaving Russia, and see to whom he will give the preference to the meanest mountebank at a wooden theatre in Naples, or to Mademoiselle Bosio at the Balschoi- . Teater here. The Russians have about the same liking for their winter as for their government. Both are THE CZAR*S HIGHWAY. 135 very splendid ; but it is uncommonly hard lines to bear either; and distance (the greater the better) lends won- ' derful enchantment to the view both of the frozen Neva and the frozen despotism. A few of the great shops on the Nevsko'i and the Morskaias have an economical supply of gas-lamps, and there is a restaurant or two so lighted. Oil and camphine are, however, the rule, and both are ex- tremely cheap ; while, on the other hand, gas is not so much from the scarcity of coal, but from the enormous expense of its transit a very dear article of con- sumption. Some of the second-class shops have oil- lamps, with polished tin reflectors ; but in the humbler underground chandlery shops, or lavkas, I have fre- quently found the only illumination to consist of a blazing pine torch, or a junk of well-tarred cable, stuck in a sconce. Rude, or altogether wanting in light, as these shops may be, there is always, even in the most miserable, a dainty lamp, frequently of silver, sus- pended by silver chains before the image of the joss, or saint. In the year 'twenty-four, a French company, after an immense amount of petitioning, intriguing, and Tchinnovnik-bribing, obtained an authorisation from the government to light the whole of St. Petersburg with gas. They dug conduits into which the water broke ; they laid down pipes which the workmen stole; they went so far as to construct a gasometer on a very large scale behind the cathedral of Kasan. They had lighted some hundred yards of the Nevskoi with gas, when a tremendous fire took place at their pre- mises, and the gasometer exploded, with great havoc of life and property. From 'twenty-four to 'thirty-nine, a period of fifteen years, not a syllable was heard about the formation of a new gas company. Public opinion, for once, was stronger than bribery ; for the ignorant and superstitious populace persisted in declar- 136 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. ing that the destruction of the gasometer was a judg- ment from Heaven to punish the Framouski-Labarki, the French dogs, for erecting their new-fangled and heretical building in the vicinage of our Lady of Kasan's most holy temple. I don't think that Siberia and the knout, even, would have been very efficacious in making the moujiks work with a will at building new premises for the offending pipes and meters. Gas is heretical ; but the Russians are slightly more tolerant of some other institutions that exist to this day just behind and all around r the most holy Kasan church, whose immediate neighbourhood enjoys an extended re- putation as being the most infamous with respect to morality in St. Petersburg. Strange that it should be the same in the shadow of Westminster's twin towers, in the shameful little dens about the Parvis Notre Dame at Paris, in the slums of St Patrick's, Dublin. The new gas company have not done much during the last sixteen years. In the suburbs there is scarcely any gas ; and the gas itself is of very inferior quality pale and flickering, and grudgingly dealt out. I need not say that the lamps are placed as high up as possible. The professional thieves would extinguish them else, or the Russians would steal the gas an act of dishonesty that, at first sight, seems impossible, but which, when you become better acquainted with my Sclavonic friends with the exquisite art by which they contrive to steal the teeth out of your head, and the- flannel jacket off your body, without your being aware- of the subtraction will appear quite facile and practi- cable. Gas in Russia ! I little thought writing the- secrets of the Gas in a popular journal three years ago, and vainly thinking that I knew them that I should ever see a Russian or a Russian gas lamp. The huge open places, or Ploschads, like stony seas,, into which the gaunt streets empty themselves, are uniformly opaved with granitous stones, of which the; THE CZAR'S HIGHWAY. 137 shores of the Gulf of Finland furnish an inexhaustible supply. This pavement, if arranged with some slight regularity, would be in the early stage of progress towards tolerable walking space ; but the foundations being utterly rotten, treacherous, and quicksandy, the unhappy paving-stones tumble about in a stodge of mud and sand ; and the Ploschads are, consequently, almost incessantly under repair. This is especially the case in the month of April, at the time of the general thaw. Part of the pavement sinks down, and part is thrown up the scoriae of small mud volcanoes, Thousands of moujiks are immediately set to work, but to very little purpose. The ground does not begin to settle before May ; and when I arrived in St. Petersburg, many of the streets were, for pedestrians, absolutely impassable. The immense parallel series of streets at Wassili-Ostrov Linies, as they are called and which are numbered from one to sixteen, as in America, were simply bogs, where you might drive, or wade, or stride through on stilts, but in which pedes- trianism was a matter of hopeless impossibility. The government, or the municipality, or the police, or the Czar, had caused to be constructed along the centre of these Linies, gigantic causeways of wooden planking, each above a mile in length, perhaps, raised some two feet above the level of the mud, and along which the dreary processions of Petersburg pedestrians were en- abled to pass. This was exceedingly commodious, as long as you merely wanted to walk for walking sake ;. but of course, wherever a perspective intersected the Linie, there was a break in the causeway, and then you saw before you, without the slightest compromise in the way of step, a yawning abyss of multi-coloured mud. Into this you are entitled either to leap, and disappear, like Edgar of Ravenswood, or to wallow in it a la piy, or to endeavour to clear it by a hop, step, and a jump. The best mode of proceeding, on the whole r 138 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH.' is to hail a droschky or a moujik, and, like the chief of Ulva's isle, offer him, not a silver pound, but sundry copper copecks, to carry you across the muddy ferry ; ^,nd this, again, may be obviated by your chartering an ischvostchik's vehicle in the first instance, and leaving the causeway to those who like leaping before they look. The ground having become a little more solid, the pavement might naturally be expected to improve. So it does, on the Nevskoi ; but, in the suburbs, the occupant of each house is expected to see to the proper state of repair of the pavement immediately before his dwelling. As the Russian householder is not precisely 50 much enamoured of his city and government as to make of his allotted space of street a sort of Tom Tidler's ground, with silver roubles and gold imperials, or to pave it with porphyry, Carrara marble, or even plain freestone, he ordinarily employs the cheapest and handiest materials that his economy or his convenience suggests. The result is a most astonishing paving- salad, in which flints, shards and pebbles, shingles, potsherds, brickbats, mortar, plaster, broken bottles, .and pure dirt are all amalgamated. The mosaic is. original but trying to the temper destructive to the boots and agonising to the corns. On the Nevskoi, almost every variety of pavement has been successively tried ; but with very indifferent success. From Macadam to India-rubber, each mate- rial has had its day. Asphalte was attempted, but failed miserably, cracking in winter and fairly melting in summer. Then longitudinal boards were laid down on the carriage-ways, in imitation of the plank roads in the suburbs of New York. Finally, M. Gourieff introduced the hexagonal wooden pavement with which, in London, we are all acquainted. This, with con- tinuous reparation, answers pretty well, taking into consideration that equality of surface seems utterly unattainable, that the knavish contractors supply blocks THE CZAR'S HIGHWAY. 139 so rotten as to be worthless a few days after they are put down, and that the horses are continually slipping and frequently falling' on the perilous highway. It is unpleasant, also, to be semiasphyxiated each time you take your walks abroad, by the fumes of the infernal pitch-caldrons, round which the moujik workmen gather, like witches. The long and splendid lines of quays (unrivalled in magnificence of material, construction, and perspective in the whole world) are paved with really noble blocks of Finland granite. It is as melancholy as irritating, to see the foul weeds growing at the kerbs ; to be obliged to mount to them (they are some fourteen inches above the level of the road) by a wretched monticule of mud or dust, like a vagrant's footway through a broken hedge ; to mark how many of the enormous slabs are cracked right across; and. how, at every six steps or so, a block has settled down below the level, so as to form the bed of a pool of foul water into which you splash. Any one can comprehend, now, why every street in the Czar's gorgeous metropolis is a Via Dolorosa, and why there are so many thousand ischvostchiks in St. Petersburg. Looking-glass slipperiness in winter ; unfordable mud in spring ; simooms of dust in summer ; lakes of sloppy horrors in autumn : these are the charac- teristics of the Czar's highway. I know impossibilities cannot be accomplished ; I know the horrible climate can't be mended ; but I have hopes of the pavement yet. There is a certain portion of the Balctio'i Mors- kaia which has, for about ten yards, a perfectly irre- proachable pavement. The legend runs that the Czar Nicholas, of imperishable memory, slipped and fell on his august back hereabouts some years ago, and that he signified his wish to the inhabitants of that part of the Morskaia to have the pavement improved, or to know the reason why. It was improved with electric 140 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. celerity, and it has been a model pavement ever since. I am not the Czar Nicholas nor the Czar Alexander, nor a bridge and pavement engineer, nor a contractor for paving and lighting. I only point out the wrong, and leave it to others to suggest the remedy. But until the Czar's highway is improved, both intra and extra muros, so long will there be barbarism in the very heart of the Venice of the north. When Peters- burg is well paved, then will the power of the stick decay, and the Tchinn no longer steal : but this is too much in the Nostradamus style of prophecy. When Russia has better roads, let us hope that there will be better people to travel on them, your humble servant included. VIII. GOSTINNOi-DVOR. THE GREAT BAZAAR. IN St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kasan, Odessa, Kieff, Wladimir, Smolensk, Novgorod, and Ekaterinoslaf not only in these, but in every Russian government town whose proportions exceed those of a village there is a Gostinnoi-dvor (literally, Things Yard, cour aux clioses), or general bazaar, for the sale of merchandise and dry provisions. The conquered and treaty-acquired provinces Polish, Swedish, German, and Turkish have their markets and emporia ; but the Gostinnoi- dvor is an institution thoroughly and purely Russian, and thoroughly Asiatic. It will be my province, in a future chapter, to speak of the Gostinnoi-dvor at Moscow, in which the native and humble Russian element is more strongly pronounced, and which is a trifle more picturesque, and a great deal dirtier, than its sister establishment in Petropolis. To the Gostinnoi- dvor, then, of St. Petersburg I devote this chapter. It is vaster in size, and incomparably more magnificent in proportions and contents, than any of its provincial rivals ; and to me it is much more interesting. It is GOSTINNOI-DVOR. THE GREAT BAZAAR. 141 here that you can watch in its fullest development that most marvellous mixture of super-civilisation and ultra-barbarism; of dirt and perfumes; accomplished, heartless scepticism, and naive though gross supersti- tion ; of prince and beggar ; poodle and bear ; prevail- ing tyrant and oppressed creature which make St. Petersburg to me one magnificent, fantastic volume ; a French translation of the Arabian Nights, bound in Russia, illustrated with Byzantine pictures, and com- piled by slaves for the amusement of masters as luxu- rious as the old Persians, as astute and accomplished as the Greeks, as cruel as the Romans, as debauched as those who dwelt in the Destroyed Cities, and whom it is a sin to name. In seventeen hundred and fifty, Russia being happy under the sway of the benign Czarine Elizabeth the want of a central bazaar being sensibly felt in the swelling capital, and nothing existing of the kind but a tumble-down row of wooden barracks, as filthy as they were inconvenient, hastily run up by convicts and Swedish prisoners in the days of Petri-Velike -an enormous edifice of timber was constructed on the banks of the Moika, close to what was then called the Green Bridge, but is now known as the Polizeiskymost or Pont de Police. This was the first Gostinno'i-dvor in St. Petersburg. Five years later it incurred the fate of theatres in all parts of the world, and of every class of buildings in Russia, that species of architectural measles known as a fire. It was burnt to the ground, together with a great portion of the quarter of the city in which it was situated ; and its re-erection, in stone, was soon after commenced on the spot where it now stands : . on the left-hand side of the Nevskoi Per- spective, and about a mile from the chapel-spire of the Admiralty. It forms an immense trapezoid, framed between four streets. Its two principal facades front the Nevskoi and the Sadovvaia, or Great Garden Street, 142 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. which last intersects the Perspective opposite the Im- perial Library. The principal facade is one hundred and seventy-two sagenes long. There are three ar- chines to a sagene, or eighty-four inches ; I think, there- fore, that I am right, according to Cockeroffsky, in saying that there is a frontage of twelve hundred and four feet, or more than four hundred English yards, to the Gostinnoi-dvor. The reconstruction in stone did not extend very far. Funds came in too slowly ; or,, more probably, were spent too quickly by these intrusted with them ; and, for a long time, the rest of the bazaar consisted of rows of barracks and booths in timber, which were all duly re-consumed by fire in seventeen hundred and eighty. The Gostinnoi-dvor was then taken in hand by the superb Catherine, who, had a decided genius for solidity and durability in architec- ture ; and under her auspices, the Great Things Yard assumed the form it now presents. Huge as it is, it only forms a part of that which the Russians call the Gorod or City of Bazaars ; for immediately adjoining it inferior in splendour of structure, but emulous in stores of merchandise and vigour of traffic, are three other bazaars, the Apraxine-dvor, the Stehoukine-dvor, and the Tolkoutchji-rinok, or Great Elbow-market, which last is the Rag Fair or Petticoat Lane of St. Petersburgh ; all the old clothes, and a great proportion of the stolen goods, of the capital being there bought and sold. On the same side of the way as the Gostinnoi-dvor on the Nevskoi, and close to the commencement of its arcades, is the enormous edifice of the Douma, or Hotel de Ville. This was originally built of wood, but has been gradually repaired and enlarged with stone, and has slowly petrified, as men's minds are apt to do in this marmorifying country. Its heart of oak is now as hard as the nether millstone ; and stucco pilasters, and cornices in Grim-Tartar Corinthian, together with GOSTINNOI-DVOR. THE GREAT BAZAAR. 145 abundance of whitewash and badigeonnement, conceal its primitive log walls. This huge place (what public building in Peters- burg is not huge?) is facetiously supposed to be the seat of the municipal corporation of St. Petersburg. There is a civil governor, or Lord Mayor, it is true, who is officially of considerably less account than the signification of an idiot's tale in the hands of M. le General Ignatieff, the military Governor-General of St. Petersburg, without whose written authority no person can leave the capital. There is a president and six Burgomasters, and a Council of Ten notable citizens ; but all and every one of them governors civil and governors military, burgomasters and notables are members of the celebrated and artistic corps of Marion- nettes, of whose performances at Genoa and at the Adelaide Gallery most people must have heard, and who have a theatre on a very large scale indeed in Holy Russia. They are beautifully modelled, dressed with extreme richness (especially as regards stars and crosses), are wonderfully supple in the joints, and have the most astonishing internal mechanism for imitating* the sounds of the human voice. The strings of these meritorious automata are pulled by a gentleman by the name of Dolgorouki, who succeeded that eminent per- former, M, Orloff, as chief of the gendarmerie and High Police, and manager (under the rose) of sixty-five millions of Marionnettes. So perfectly is he master of the strings of his puppets, and so well is he acquainted with the departments behind the scenes of the Theatre Royal, Russia, that the ostensible lessee and manager, Alexander Nicolaieviteh, who inherited the property from his father, Nicolaialeosandrovitch (an enterprising manager, but too fond of heavy melodramas of the startling order), is said to be rather afraid of his stage- manager. A. N. is a mild and beneficent middle-aged young man, whose dramatic predilections are supposed 144 A JOUKNEY DUE NORTH. to lean towards light vaudevilles and burlettas, making all the characters happy at the fall of the curtain. He is not indisposed either, they say, to many free transla- tions from the French and English ; but the stage- manager of the Marionnettes won't hear of such a thing, and continues to keep the tightest of hands over his puppets. The most curious feature in all this is, that the stage-manager has himself a master whom he is compelled, no one knows why, to obey. This master a slow, cruel, treacherous, dishonest tyrant is never seen, but dwells remote from mortal eyes, though not from their miserable ken, like the Grand Lama. His her its name is System. Liberal, nay, democratic stage-managers, have been known to assume the government of the sixty-five million dolls, and forthwith, in their blind obedience to system, to become intolerable oppressors, spies, and thieves. Things have gone wrong before now in the Theatre Royal ; and several lessees have died of sore throat, of stomach- ache, of head-ache, and of compression of the oeso- phagus. But this abominable System has lived through all vicissitudes, and though immensely old, is as strong and wicked as ever.* The old hypocrite gives out occasionally that he is about to reform ; but the only way to reform that hoary miscreant, is to strangle him at once, and outright. Your fingers are not unac- customed to this work, most noble Boyards. * A magnificent diamond tabatiere full of snuff was thrown into the eyes of Western Europe from the coronation throne at Moscow. The only real abolition of a grievance, in this much- belauded manifesto, was the removal of part of the tax on pass- ports to native Russians, who, if they had families, were formerly obliged to pay something like four hundred pounds a-year to the government while travelling. The political amnesty was a cruel farce : not but that I believe the Emperor Alexander to be (though deficient in strength of mind) a sovereign of thorough liberal tendencies, and of extreme kindness of heart ; but he dares not accomplish a tithe of the reforms he meditates. I was speaking one day to an intelligent Russian on this subject (he was a re- GOSTINNOI-DVOR. THE GREAT BAZAAR. 145 The only timber yet unshivered of the Douma is the great watchtower, one hundred and fifty feet in height, which is entirely of sham marble, but real wood. There is a curious telegraphic apparatus of iron at the summit, and in this work the different fire-signals. They are in constant employment. I can imagine no better way of conveying a palpable notion of things I have seen in this strange land than to institute comparisons between things Russian, which my reader will never know, I hope, save through the medium of faithful travellers, and things familiar to us all in London and Paris. So. If you take one avenue of the glorious Palais Royal, say that where the gold- smith and jewellers' shops are, and with this combine the old colonnade of the Regent's Quadrant; if to this you add a dwarfed semblance of the Piazza in Covent Garden especially as regards the coffee-stalls at early morning ; if you throw in a dash of the Cloisters of Westminster Abbey taking care to By- zantinise all the Gothic, but keeping all the chequered effects of chiaro-oscuro ; if, still elaborating your work, you piece on a fragment of that musty little colonnade out of Lower Regent Street, which ought to belong to the Italian Opera House, but doesn't, and at whose corner Mr. Seguin's library used to be ; if, as a final architectural effort, you finish off with a few yards of the dark entry in Canterbury Cathedral yard, and with as much as you like (there is not much) of that particularly grim, ghostly, and mildewed arcade publican and a socialist, but an accomplished gentleman), who, so far from blaming the Czar for his meagre concessions to the spirit of the age, made a purely Russian excuse for him : "Que voulez- vous ?" he said ; " le Tsar lui-m^me a peur d'etre rosse par la Police Secrete." The idea of the Autocrat of all the Russias being deterred from increased liberalism by bodily fear of the STICK is sufficiently extravagant ; but there is, nevertheless, a great deal of truth in the locution. 146 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. at the Fields corner of Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn : if you make an architectural salmagundy of all these ; spice with a flavour of the delightful up-and- down, under-the-basement and over-the-tiles, streets of Chester ; garnish with that portion of the peristyle of the Palace of the Institute in Paris, where the print-stalls are ; and serve up hot with reminiscences of what old Exeter 'Change must "have been like ; you will have something of a skeleton notion of the outward ap- pearance of the Gostinnoi-dvor. Further to educate the eye, I must relate, that round all the pillars there is a long Lowther Arcade broke loose, of toys and small ware ; that the Palais-Koyal-like shops are cu- riously dovetailed with bits of the Bezesteen at Con- stantinople ; that amongst the diamonds and gold lace rthere is a strong tinge of Holywell Street. To plant the photograph well in the stereoscope, I must beg my reader to endeavour to imagine this London and Paris medley transplanted to Russia. There is a roaring street outside, along which the fierce-horsed and fierce driven droschkies fly ; through the interstices of the arches, you see, first droschkies, then dust, then palaces, palaces, palaces, then a blue blue sky; within a crowd of helmets, grey greatcoats, beards, boots, red .shirts, sheepskins, sabres, long grey cloaks, pink bonnets, and black velvet mantles, little children in fancy bonnets ; nurses in crimson satin, and pearl tiaras ; -and all this circulating in an atmosphere where the Burlington Arcade-like odour of pomatum and bouquet a la reine (for perfumes abound in the Gostinnoi-dvor) struggles with that of Russia leather, wax-candles, and* that one powerful searching, oleaginous smell, which is compounded of Heaven knows what, but which is the natural, and to the manner-born, smell of the sainted land. Mind, too, that the roofs are vaulted, and that no lamps save sacred ones are ever allowed to be here lighted ; and that at about every interval of ten yards GOSTINXOI-DVOR. THE GREAT BAZAAR. 147 there is a frowning archway whose crown and spandrils are filled in with holy pictures, richly framed in gold and silver, and often, more richly jewelled. For in this the special home and house of call for commercial roguery, the arrangements for the admired Fetish- worship are on a very grand and liberal scale. A lamp suspended before the picture of a saint is supposed to carry an indisputable policy of insurance with it in its sacred destination ; but, votive lamps apart, not, a light is allowed at any time, night or day, in the Gostinno'i-dvor. There are no cigar-shops, it need scarcely be said nor magasins for the sale of lucifer- matches. The Russians have a peculiar horror of, and jet fondness for, lucifer-matches, or spitckki, as they are called. There is a popular notion among servants and peasants, that they are all contraband (I never had the slightest difficulty in purchasing them openly), and that their sale except to nobles, of course is prohi- bited by the government. There are so many things you may not do in Russia, that I should not have been the least surprised if this had really been the case. The Russian matches, I may add, are of the most infamous quality one in about twenty igniting. I believe that it is considered rather mauvais ton than otherwise if you do not frictionise them on the wall to obtain a light. I had a Cossack servant on whom, on my departure from Russia, I bestowed a large box of wax-taper matches I had brought from Berlin ; and I verily believe that he was more gratified with the gift than with the few paper roubles I gave him in addition. As soon as it is dusk the shops of the Gostinnoi-dvor are shut, and the early-closing movement carried into practical operation by hundreds of merchants and shop- men. Within a very recent period, even, so intense was the dread of some fresh conflagration that no stove or fireplace, not so much as a brazier or chauffer 'ette, was suffered to exist within the bazaar. The unfor- L 2 148 'A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. tunate shopkeepers wrapped themselves up as well as they could in pelisses of white wolfskin (which in winter, forms still a distinctive item of their costume) ; and by one ingenious spirit there was invented a peculiar casque- or helmet of rabbit-skin, which had a fur visor but- toning over the nose something after the horribly ab- surd manner of the convicts' caps at Pentonville prison. Some hundreds of cases of frost-bite having occurred;, however, and a large proportion of the merchants- showing signs of a tendency to make up for the lack of outward heat by the administration of inward stimu- lants, the government stepped in just as the consump- tion of alcohol threatened to make spontaneous combus- tion imminent, and graciously allowed stoves in the Gostinnoi-dvor. These are only tolerated from the first of November to the first of the ensuing April, and are' constructed on one uniform and ingenious pattern, the invention of General AmossofF. Thus remembering; all these regulation stoves, that no wood has been used in the construction of the whole immense fabric all being stone, brick, and iron, the very doors being lined with sheets of the last-named material ; and recalling all the elaborate and severe police regulations for guarding the Gostinnoi-dvor against the devouring: element, I should take it quite as a matter of course,, were I to hear some fine morning that the pride of mercantile Petersburg had been burnt to the ground. Man has a way of proposing and Heaven of disposing, which slide in perfectly different grooves. Iron cur- tains for isolation, fire-proof basements, and reservoirs on roofs, won't always save buildings from destruction,, somehow ; Surrey Music Hall, Victoria Theatre, Polytechnic, Leeds Hall, passim. And though nothing can be more admirable than the precautions against fire adopted by the authorities, the merchants of the Gos- tinnoi-dvor have an ugly habit of cowering in their back shops, where you may frequently detect them in the very GOSTIXXOI-DVOR. THE GREAT BAZAAR. 149 act of smoking pipes of Joukoff tobacco, up the sleeves of their wolf-skin touloupes, or poking charcoal embers into the eternal Samovar or tea-urn. I have too much respect for the hagiology of the orthodox Greek Church to attribute any positive danger from fire to the thou- .sand and one sacred grease-pots that swing, kindled, from flimsy chains in every hole and corner ; but I know, that were I agent for the Sun Fire Insurance, I would, .grant no policy, or, at all events, pay none, for a house in which [there was a samovar. Once lighted, it is ?the best tea-urn in the world ; the drawback is, that you run a great risk of burning the house down before _you can warm your samovar properly. The shops in the Gostinnoi-dvor are divided into lines or rows, as are the booths^ in John Bunyan's Vanity Fair. There is Silkmercers' Row ; opposite to which, on the other side of the street, are Feather-bed Row and Watchmakers' Row. Along the Nevsko'i side extend Cloth-merchants' Row, Haberdashers' Row, and Port- manteau Row, intermingled with which are sundry stationers, booksellers, and hatters. The side of the trapezoid over against the Apraxine-dvor (which runs parallel to the Nevskoi) is principally occupied by cop- persmiths and trunkmakers ; the archways are devoted to the stalls of toy-merchants and dealers in holy images : while all the pillar-standings are occupied by petty chapmen and hucksters of articles as cheap as they are miscellaneous. It is this in-door and out-door selling that gives the Gostinnoi-dvor such a quaint resemblance to a Willis's Room Fancy Fair set up in the middle of Whitechapel High Street. One side of the trapezoid I have left unmentioned, and that is the long arcade facing the Sadovvaia, or Great Garden Street. This is almost exclusively taken up by the great Boot Row. Every human being is supposed to be a little insane on some one subject. To the way of watches some 150 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. men's madness lies ; others are cracked about religion, government, vegetarianism, perpetual motion, economi- cal chimney-sweeping, lead-mines, squaring the circle, or the One Primeval language. Take your soberest, most business-like friend, and run carefully over his mental gamut, and you shall come on the false note ; sweep the lyre and you shall find one cracked chord. I knew a man once the keenest at driving a bargain to be met with out of Mark Lane who never went mad till two o'clock in the morning, and on one topic ; and then he was as mad as a March hare. We think that we have such an excellent coinage ; but how many a bright- looking shilling is only worth elevenpence halfpenny I We boast of our improved beehives ; but how often the buzzing honey-makers forsake the hive, and house themselves in our bonnets! I have a Boswell (every writer, to the lowliest, has his Boswell) who professes to> have read my printed works ; and according to him I am mad on the subject of boots. He declares that my pen is as faithful to the boot-tree as the needle to the pole ; and that, even as the late Lord Byron could not write half-a-dozen stanzas without alluding, in some shape or other, to his own lordship's personal attrac- tions and hopeless misery, so I cannot get over fifty lines of printed matter without dragging in boots, di- rectly or indirectly, as a topic for description or disqui- sition. It may be so. It is certain that I have a great affection for boots, and can ride a boot-jack as I would a hobby-horse. Often have I speculated philosophi- cally upon old boots ; oftener have I ardently desired the possession of new ones ; and of the little, man wants here below, nor wants long, I cannot call to mind anything I have an earnester ambition for than a great many pairs of new boots good boots nicely blacked, all of a row, and all paid for. I have men- tioned, and admit this boot-weakness, because I feel my soul expand, and my ideas grow lucid as I approach GGSTINXOI-DVOR. THE GREA.T BAZAAR. 151 the great Sapagi-Linie, or Boot Row of the Gostinnoi- dvor. The Russians are essentially a booted people. The commonalty do not understand shoes at all ; and when they have no boots, either go barefooted, or else thrust their extremities into atrocious canoes of plaited birch- bark. Next to a handsome kakoschnik or tiara head- dress, the article of costume most coveted by a peasant- woman is a pair of full-sized men's boots. One of the prettiest young English ladies I ever knew* used to wear Wellington boots, and had a way of tapping their polished sides with her parasol-handle that well nigh drove me distracted ; but let that pass a booted Eus- sian female is quite another sort of personage. In the streets of Petersburg the ' sign of the leg ' or a huge jack-boot with a tremendous spur, all painted the brightest scarlet, is to be found on legions of houses. The common soldiers wear mighty boots, as our naval brigade, after Alma, knew full well ; and if you make a morning call on a Russian gentleman, you will very probably find him giving audience to his bootmaker. But the Boot Row of the Gostinnoi-dvor ! Shops follow shops, whose loaded shelves display seemingly interminable rows of, works addressed to the under- standing, and bound in the best Russia leather. The air is thick and heavy not exactly with the spicy per- fumes of Araby the Blest but with the odour of the birch-bark, used in the preparation of the leather. Only here can you understand how lamentably sterile we western nations are in the invention of boots. Wellingtons, top-boots, Bluchers, Oxonians, high-lows, and patent leather Albert slippers, name these, and our boot catalogue is very nearly exhausted ; for, though there are very many other names for boots, and cunning tradesmen have even done violence to the Latin and Greek languages, joining them in unholy alliance to produce monstrous appellations for new 152 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. boots ; the articles themselves have been but dreary repetitions of the old forms. What is the Claviculo- didas-tokolon, or the Antigropetos, but an attenuated Wellington? what is even the well-known and es- tablished Clarence but a genteel highlow ? But, in the Sapagi-Linie you shall find boots of a strange fashion, and peculiar to this strange people. There are the tall jack-boots, worn till within a few months since by the Czar's chevalier guards. They are so long, so stern, so rigid, so uncompromising that the big boots of our lifeguardsmen would look mere stocking-hose to them. They are rigid, creaseless, these boots : the eyes, methinks, of James the Second would have glistened with pleasure to see them ; they seem the very boots that gracious tyrant would have put a criminal's legs into, and driven wedges between. They stand up bodily, boldly on the shelves, kicking the walls behind them with their long gilt spurs, trampling their wooden resting-place beneath their tall heels, pointing their toes menacingly at the curious stranger. As to polish, they are varnished rather than blackened, to such a degree of brilliancy, that the Great Unknown immortalised by Mr. Warren, might not only shave himself in them, but flick the minutest speck of dust out of the corner of his eye, by the aid of their mirrored surface. These boots are so tall, and strong, and hard, that I believe them to be musket-proof, bomb-proof, Jacobi-machine proof, as they say the forts of Cronstadt are. If it should ever happen that the chevalier guards went forth to battle, (how did all the correspondents in the Crimea make the mistake of imagining that the Russian chevalier guards as guards were sent to Sebastopol ?) and that some of those stu- pendous cavaliers were laid low by hostile sabre or deadly bullet, those boots, I am sure, would never yield. The troopers might fall, but the boots would remain erect on the ensanguined field, like trees, scathed indeed GOSTINXOI-DVOK. THE GREAT BAZAAR. 153 by lightning, and encumbered by the wreck of branches and foliage, but standing still, firm-rooted and defiant. But they will never have the good luck to see the tented field, these boots, even if there be a new war, and the chevaliers be sent to fight. The jack-boots have been abolished by the Czar Alexander, and trousers with stripes down the sides substituted for them. They only exist now in reality on the shelves of the Sapagi- Linie, and in the imagination of the artists of the illus- trated newspapers. Those leal men were true to the jack-boot tradition. Each artist wrote from Moscow home to his particular journal to assure his editor that his drawings were the only correct ones, and that he was the only correspondent to be depended upon ; and each depicted costumes that never existed, or have fallen into desuetude long since. Wondrous publications are illus- trated newspapers ! I saw the other day, in a Great Pictorial Journal, some charming little views of St. Petersburg in eighteen hundred and fifty-six, and lo ! they are exact copies of some little views I have of St. Petersburg in eighteen hundred and thirty-seven. There is one of a bridge from St. Izaak's church to Wassily-Ostrow, that has been removed these ten years ; but this is an age of go-aheadism, and it is not for me to complain. The jack-boots of the chevalier guards, however, I will no more admit than I will their presence in the Crimea : for wert thou not my friend and beloved, Arcadi-Andrievitch ? count, possessor of serfs, honorary counsellor of the college, and cornet in the famous chevalier guards of the empress ? Four languages didst thou speak, Arcadi-Andrievitch, baritone was thy voice, and of the school of Tamburini thy vocalisation. Not much afraid of Leopold de Meyer need'st thou have been on the pianoforte ; expert decorator wert thou of ladies' albums; admirable worker of slippers in gold and silver thread; cunning handicraftsman in wax flowers, and dauntless breaker-in of untamed horses. 154 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. In England, Arcadi-Andrievitch, thou wouldst have been a smooth-faced schoolboy. In precocious Russia thou wert honorary counsellor, and had a college diploma, a droschky orharas, a stud of brood mares, and a cornetcy in the Guards. There are hair-dressers in Russia who will force inustachios on little boy's lips (noble little boys), and they have them like early peas or hothouse pines ; for everything is to be had for silver roubles, even virility. Arcadi-Andrievitch and I were great friends. He had been for some months expectant of his cornetcy, and longing to change his Lyceum or college cocked-hat, blue frock, and toasting-fork-like small sword, for the gorgeous equipments of a guards- man. He was becoming melancholy at the delay in re- ceiving his commission ; now, fancying that the Czar's aides-de-camp had sequestered his petition ; now, that his Majesty himself had a spite against him, and was saying, ' No ! Arcadi-Andrievitch, you shall not have your cornetcy yet awhile ;' now grumbling at the con- tinual doses of paper roubles he was compelled to ad- minister to the scribes at the War-office and the Etat Major. The Russians (the well-born ones) are such liars that I had begun to make small bets with myself that Arcadi-Andrievitch had been destined by his papa for the career of a Tchinovnik, or government clerk, and not for a guardsman at all ; when the youth burst into my room one day, in a state of excitement so violent as to lead him to commit two grammatical errors in the course of half an-hour's French conversation, and in- formed me, that at last he had received his com- mission. I saw it; the Imperial Prikaz or edict, furnished with a double eagle big enough to fly away with a baby. Arcadi-Andrievitch was a Cornet. I am. enabled to mention my Russian friends by name without incurring the slightest risk of compromising them, or betraying private friendship ; for in Russia you do not call a friend Brownoff or Smithoffsky, but you address GOSTINXOI-DVOR. THE GREAT BAZAAR. 155 him by his Christian name, adding to it the Christian name of his father. Thus, Arcadi-Andrievitch, Ar- cadius the son of Andrew. You employ the same locu- tion with a lady : always taking care to use her father's- baptismal name. Thus, Alexandra-Fedrovna, Alex- andra the daughter of Theodore. To return to my Arcadi-Andrievitch. Though he- was but a little boy, he possessed, as I have remarked, a droschky ; and in this vehicle, a very handsome one,, with a fast trotter in the shafts, and a clever mare,. dressfe a la voice, by the side, and driven by a flowing- bearded moujik, his property, he took me home to> see his uniforms. The young rogue had had them all ready for the last six weeks, and many a time r I will be bound, he had tried them on, and admired his little figure in the glass, late at night or early in the morning. Although this lad had a dimpled chin that never had felt the barber's shear, he had a very big house all to himself, on the Dvortsova'ia Naberejenaia, or Palace Quay : a mansion perhaps as- large as Lord John Russell's in Chesham Place, and a great deal handsomer. It was his house : his Dom ; the land was his, and the horses in the stable were his, and the servants in the antechamber were his, to have- and to hold under Heaven and the Czar. I forget how many thousand roubles, spending money, be had a year,, this beardless young fellow. I saw his uniforms ; the tunic of white cloth and silver ; the cuirass of gold ; the- brilliant casque surmounted by a flowing white plume ; the massive epaulettes, the long silver sash, together with a vast supplementary wardrobe of undress frocks and overalls, and the inevitable grey capote. ' But where,' I asked, ' are the jack-boots I have so often admired in the Sapagi-Linie, and the military costume- prints in Daziaro's window ?' He sighed, and shook his head mournfully. 'The Gossudar' (the lord) ' ha& abolished the boots,' he answered. 'I used to dream of them. I had ordered four pairs not in the Cos- 156 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. tinnoi-dvor ; for the bootmakers there are soukinsinoi (sons of female dogs) but of my own sabakout- chilovek, of a booter who is a German hound, and lives in the Resurrection Perspective. He brought them home on the very day that the boots were sup- pressed. He had the impudence to say that he could not foresee the intentions of the Imperial Government, and to request me to pay for them ; upon which, I believe, Mirophan, my body servant, broke two of his teeth accidentally, of course, in pushing him down- stairs. He is an excellent bootmaker, and one whom I can conscientiously recommend to you, and has long since, I have no doubt, put on more than the price of my jack-boots and his broken teeth to my subsequent bills. Mais, que voulez-vousf Thus far Arcadi- Andrievitch ; and this is how I came to know that the Chevalier Guards no longer wore jack-boots. I wonder why they were swept, away. Sometimes I fency it was because their prestige, as boots, disappeared with the Czar Nicholas. Like that monarch, they were tall, stern, rigid, uncompromising ; the cloth over- alls were more suited to the conciliating rule of Alex- ander the Second. Nicholas, like Bombastes, hung his terrible boots to the branch of a tree, and defied those who dared displace them to meet him face to face. They were displaced, and he was met face to face, and the Czar Bombastes died in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole, in a certain vaulted chamber in the Winter Palace. I have seen the tears trickle down the cheeks of the Ischvostchiks passing the window of this chamber, when they have pointed upward, and told me that Uncle Nicolai died there ; and Nicholas indeed had millions to weep for him, all save his kindred, and his courtiers, and those who had felt his wicked iron hand. There is a hot wind about the death-beds of such sovereigns that dries up the eyes of those who dwell within palaces. Jar, far away have the jack-boots of the Empress's GOSTIXXOI-DVOR. THE GREAT BAZAAR. 157 Guards led me from the Sapagi-Linie of the Gos- tinnoi-dvor, to which I must, for very shame, return. More boots, though. Here are the hessians worn by the dashing hussars of Grodno, hessians quite of the Romeo Coates cut. Now, the jack-boot is straight and rigid in its lustrous leather all the way down, from mid-thigh to ankle ; whereas to your smart hussar,, there is allowed the latitude of some dozen creases or wrinkles in the boot about three inches above the in- step, and made with studied carelessness. Then the body of the boot goes straight swelling up the calf. I doubt not but a wrinkle the more or the less on parade would bring a hussar of Grodno to grief. These hes- sians are bound round the tops with broad gold lace, and are completed by rich bullion tassels. Surely it was a spindle-shanked generation that gave over wearing hessians ; and a chuckle-headed generation that imbecilely persist in covering the handsomest part of the boot with hideous trousers. To have done with the Gostinnoi-dvor, you have here the slight, shapely boots of the militia officer, light and yielding, and somewhat resembling the top-boots of an English jockey r but with the tops of scarlet leather in lieu of our sporting ochre : there are the boots worn by the Les- ghians of the Imperial Escort, curious boots, shelving down at the tops like vertical coal-scuttles, and with, quaint, concave soles, made to fit the coalscoop-like stirrups of those very wild horsemen ; and, finally, there- are the barbarically gorgeous boots or rather, boot- hose of the Circassians of the Guard, long, lustrous- half-trews, of a sort of chain-mail of leather, the tops and feet of embroidered scarlet leather, with garters and anklets of silver fringe and beads, and with long, downward-curved spurs of silver, chased and ern- The theme shall still be boots, for the Sapagi-Linie" overflows with characteristic boots. Are not boots 158 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. the most distinctive parts and parcels of the Russian costume? and am I not come from London, to the Gostinno'i-dvor, expressly to chronicle such matters? Am I not in possession of this, a Russian establish- ment, and is it not my task, like an honest broker's man, to take a faithful inventory of the sticks ? Here are the long boots of Tamboff, reaching high up the thigh, and all of scarlet leather. These boots have a peculiar, and, to me, delightful odour, more of myrrh, frankincense, sandal-wood, benzoin, and other odoriferents, than of the ordinary birch-bark tanned leather. They will serve a double purpose. They are impervious to wet ; and (if you don't mind having red legs, like a halberdier or a turkey-cock) are excellent things to splash through the mud in ; for mud only stains them in a picturesque and having-seen-service sort of way ; and if you hang them to dry in your chamber when you return, they will pervade the whole suite of apartments with a balmy, breezy scent of new dressing-case and pocket- book, combined with pot-pourri in a jar of vieux Sevres, pastilles of Damascus, Stamboul tchibouk-sticks, and pink billet-doux from a countess. If you like those odours gently blended one with the other, you would revel in Tamboff boots. But perhaps you like the odour of roast-meat better, and cannot abide the smell of any leather. There are as many men as many tastes as minds to them, we know. There are some that can- not abide a gaping pig ; and I have heard of people who swooned at the sight of Shapsygar cheese, and became hysterical at the smell of garlic. Who has not heard of the world-famous Kasan boots ? Well ; perhaps not quite world-famous there are, to be sure, a good many things Russian, and deser- vedly celebrated there, which are quite unknown beyond the limits of the Empire. At all events, the boots of Kasan deserve to be famous all over the world : and I will do my best though that may be but little to GOSTINNOI-DVOE. THE GREAT BAZAAR. 159 make them known to civilised Europe. The Kasan toot supplies the long-sought-after and sighed-for desideratum of a slipper that will keep on of a boot that the wearer may lounge and kick his legs about in, unmindful of the state of his stocking-heels (I do not allude to holes, though they will happen in the best- regulated bachelor families, but to darns, which, though tidier, are equally distasteful to the sight), or a boot- slipper, or slipper-boot, which can be pulled off and on with far greater ease than a glove ; which cannot be trodden down at heel, and which will last through all sorts of usage a most delightfully unreasonable time. The Kasan boot is innately Tartar, and the famous Balsagi of the Turkish women loose, hideous, but comfortable boots of yellow leather which they pull over their papouches when they go a bathing or a bazaaring are evidently borrowed from the Kasari prototype. This, to be descriptive after having been (not unduly) eulogistic, is a short boot of the highlow pattern, usually of dark crimson leather (other colours can be had, but red is the favourite with the Russians). There is a cushion-like heel, admirably yielding and elastic, and a sole apparently composed of tanned brown paper, 1 '! so slight and soft is it, but which is quite tough enough and landworthy enough for any lounging purpose. It is lined with blue silk, whose only disadvantage is, that if you wear the Kasan boot, as most noble Bussians do (without stockings), the dye of the silk being rather imperfectly fixed, comes off on your flesh, and gives you the appearance of an ancient woad-stained Briton. The shin and instep of the Kasan boot are made rich and rare by the most cunning and fantastic workmanship in silver-thread and bead- work, and mosaic arid marqueterie, or buhl-work, or inlaying call it what you will of different coloured leathers. There is a tinge of the Indian mocassin about it, a savour of the carpets of Ispahan, a touch of the 160 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. dome of St. Mark's, Venice ; but a pervading and pre- ponderating flavour of this wild-beast-with-his-hide^ painted-and-his-claws-gilt country. It isn't Turkish, it isn't Byzantine, it isn't Venetian, it isn't Moyen-Age Bohemian. Why or how should it be, indeed, seeing that it is a boot from Kasan in Russia ? Yet it has, like the monstrous Gostinnoi-dvor, its most certain dim characteristics of all the first four mentioned national i- ties, which alt succumb, though, in the long run, to< the pure barbaric Muscovite element, .unchanged and unchangeable (for all thy violent veneering, Peter Velike !) from the days of Rurik and Boris-Goudonof, and the false Demitrius. Every rose has a thorn every advantage its drawback ; and the quaint, cosy,, luxuriant boot of Kasan has one, in the shape of a very powerful and remarkably unpleasant odour, of which fried candle-grease and a wet day in Bermondsey would appear to be the chief components. Whether the men. of Kasan have some secret or subtle grease wherewith to render the leather supple, and that the disagreeable odour is so inherent to and inseparable from it as the- nasty taste from that precious among medicaments, castor-oil ; or whether the Kasan boot smell is simply one of the nine hundred and twelve distinct Russian stenches, of whose naturalisation in all the Russias,, Euler, Malte-Brun,' and other savans, scientific and geographical, have been unaccountably silent, is uncer- tain; but so it is. We must accept the Kasan boot as it is, and not repine at its powerful odour. Camphor will do much ; philosophy more ; acclimatisation to< Russian smells, most of all. There is certainly no invention for morning lounging, that can equal this delightful boot. Our common Western slipper is an inelegant, slipshod, dangling,, prone- to-bursting-at-the-side imposition (that I had any chance of obtaining those beauteous silk-and-bead slip- pers thou hast been embroidering for the last two years, GOSTINNOI-DVOR. THE GREAT BAZAAR. 161 -oh, Juliana !) There is certainly something to be said in favour of the highly-arched Turkish papouche. It is very easy to take off; but then it is very difficult to keep on ; though, for the purpose of correcting an im- pertinent domestic on the mouth, its sharp wooden heel is perhaps unrivalled. There are several men I should like to kick, too, with a papouche its turned-up toe is .at once contemptuous and pain-inflicting'. I have heard it said that the very best slippers in the world are an old pair of boots, ventilated with corn-valves made with a razor ; but the sage who gave utterance to that opinion, sensible as it is, would change his mind if I .had bethought myself of bringing him home a pair of .Kasan boots. I have but one pair, of which, at the risk of being thought selfish, I do not mean, under any circumstances, to deprive myself. I have but to thrust my foot out of bed in the morning, for the Kasan boot to come, as it were of its own volition, and nestle to my foot till it has coiled itself round it, rather than shod me. I may toast the soles of this boot of boots against the walls of my stove (my feet being within them), without the slightest danger of scorching my flesh or injuring the leather. I might strop a razor on my Kasan toot ; in short, I might do as many things with it as with the dear old Leather Bottelle in the song ; and when it is past its legitimate work it will serve to keep nails in, or tobacco, or such small wares. The morning equipment of a Russian seigneur is never complete without Kasan boots. When you pay an early visit to one of these, you will find his dis- tinguished Origin reclining on an ottoman, a very long Turkish chibouk, filled with the astute M. Fortuna's krepky tabaky between his lips, his aristocratic form enveloped either in a long Caucasian caftan of the finest sheepskin, or in a flowered Persian dressing-gown, a voluminous pair of charovars, or loose trousers of black velvet bound round his hips with a shawl of crape and M 162 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. gold tissue, while a pair of genuine Kasan boots (to* follow out the approved three-volume novel formula) complete his costume. Stay his Origin's head will be swathed in a silk pocket-handkerchief, whifch sometimes from its pattern, and sometimes from its uncleanliness, is not quite so picturesque. On a gueridon, or side- table, there will be a green velvet porte-cigare, a box of sweetmeats, a bottle of Bordeaux, a syphon of Seltzer water, and a half-emptied tumbler of tea, looking very muddy and sticky in its glass prism. There will be & lap-dog in the room that has been taught to understand French, though a Cossack cur by four descents, and by the word of command, in that language, goes through the military exercise. There will be the lap- dog, Mouche, or Brio's, plate of macaroons and milk in the corner. There will be, very probably, a parrot,, perhaps a monkey ; but in default of these, certainly a musical box, or a guitar. Scattered round his Origin's feet, and on his ottoman, will be his Origin's morning, light literature : Paul de Kock, Charles de Bernard, or Xavier de Montepin, their amusing and instructive works : [Gentlemen of the old school read Pigault- Lebrun and Ducray-Dumesnil :] you never see any newspapers. His Origin does not care about boring himself with the Journal de St. Petersbourg, or the Gazette de 1' Academic ; and as for the Times, Punch, the Charivari, they are not to be had, even for Nous Autres, in Russia. You seldom see any Russian book, unless his excellency deigns to be a savant. What is the good of studying the literature of a language which Nous Autres never speak ? There is a piano in a corner, with a good deal of tobacco-ash on the keys. There are some portraits of opera girls on the walls, and some more Paris Boulevard lithographs, too silly to be vicious, though meant to be so. If my reader wants to see portraits of Our Lady, or of the Czar, he or she must go to Gavrilo-Ermovaievitch, the merchant's house, or CONCERNING BOOTS AND SHOES. Sophron-Pavlytch, the moujik's cabin not to the mansions of Nous Autres. There is about the chamber, either in costume, or accoutrement, some slight but unmistakeable sign of its owner not always wearing the Persian dressing-gown, the charovars, and the Kasan boots, but being compelled to wear a sword, a helmet, a grey greatcoat, and a stand-up collar ; and there is, besides the parrot, the monkey, and the lap-dog, another living thing in some corner or other in the shape of one of his Origin's serfs, who is pottering about making cigarettes, or puffing at a samovar, or polishing a watch- case, silently, and slavishly, as is his duty. IX. CONCERNING BOOTS AND SHOES. I HAVE heard boots spoken of (not in very polite so- ciety) by the name of ' Steppers/ I am in a position, now, to trace the etymology of the expression. Steppers are derived, evidently, from the enormous Steppe boots which the merchants in the Sapagi-Linie have to sell. Do you know what mudlarks' boots are ? I mean such as are worn by the sewer-rum in agers of Paris, which boots cost a hundred francs a pair, and of which only three pairs are allowed by the municipality per escouade, or squad of mudlarks. Of such are the Steppe boots ; only bigger, only thicker, only properer for carrying stores and sundries, besides legs, like Sir Hudibras's trunk-hose. 1 don't know if hippopotamus' hide be cheap in Russia, or rhinoceros' skin a drug in the market ; but of one or other of this class of integuments the Steppe boots seem to be made. When they become old, the leather forms itself into horny scales and bony ridges ; the thread they are sewed with may turn into wire; the soles become impregnated with flinty particles, and calcined atoms of loamy soil, and so concrete, and more durable ; but, as for wearing away on the outside, you never catch the Steppe boots doing that. They M 2 164 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. are not altogether exempt from decay, either, these Blunderborean boots ; and, like Dead-Sea apples, are frequently rotten within, while their exterior is stout and fair to look upon ; for they are lined throughout (and an admirably warm and comfortable lining it makes) with sheepskin, dressed to a silky state of soft- ness, and curried into little spherical tufts, like the wool on a blackamoor's head with whom the great dif- ficulty of ages has been overcome, and who has been washed white. For ornament's sake, the sheepskin is superseded round the tops by bands of rabbit or miniver skin ; and there is a complicated apparatus of straps, buckles, and strings, to keep the boots at due midthigh height. But there is a profligate insect called the moth, a gay, fluttering, volatile, reckless scapegrace, always burning candles at both ends, and burning his own silly fingers in the long run who has an irrepressible pen- chant for obtaining board and lodging gratis in the woolly recesses of the sheepskin lining. Here he lives with several other prodigals, his relatives, in the most riotous and wasteful fashion living on the fat, or rather, the wool of the land, and most ungratefully devouring the very roof that covers him. He sneezes at camphor, and defies dusting ; and he and his crew would very speedily devour every atom of your boot-linings, but for the agency of a very powerful and, to moth, deadly substance, called mahorka. Mahorka is the very strongest, coarsest, essential -oiliest tobacco imaginable. It smells ye gods, how it smells ! It smokes as though it were made of the ashes of the bottomless pit, mingled with the leaves of the upas-tree, seasoned with assafoetida and cocculus indicus. It is, altogether, about the sort of tobacco against which James the First might have written his Counterblast, and a pipe of which he might have [offered the devil, as a digester to his proposed repast of a pig, and a poll of ling, with mustard. This rcahorka (the only tobacco the common people care CONCERNING BOOTS AND SHOES. 165 about smoking) is, by Pavel or Dmitrych, your servants, rubbed periodically into tbe lining of your boots (and into your scbooba, too, and whatever other articles of furriery you may happen to possess), causing the silly moth 10 fly away if, indeed, it leave him any wings to fly, or body to fly away with. It kills all insects, and it nearly kills you, if you incautiously approach too closely to a newly-mahorka'd boot. Pavel and Dmitrych, too, are provokingly addicted to dropping the abominable stuft' about, and rubbing it into dress- coats and moire-antique waistcoats, not only irrevocably spoiling those garments, but producing the same sternu- tatory effects on your olfactory nerves, as though some- body had been burning a warming-pan full of cayenne pepper in your apartment. All things admitted, how- ever, mahorka is a sovereign specific against moths. Every social observance in Russia is tranche pecu- liar to one of the two great classes : it is a noble's custom, or a moujik's custom, but is never common to both. Russian gentlemen, within doors, are inces- sant smokers ; the common people use very little to- bacco. You never see a moujik smoking a cigar, and very rarely even, enjoying his pipe. In some of the low vodki shops I have seen a group of moujiks with one blackened pipe among them, with a shattered bowl and scarcely any stem, charged with this same mahorka. The pipe was passed from hand to hand, each smoker taking a solemn whiff, and giving a placid grunt, exactly as you may see a party of Irish bogtrotters doing in a Connemara shebeen. Down south in Russia I mean in the governments of Koursk and Woro- nesch there is a more Oriental fashion of smoking in vogue. Some mahorka, with more or less dirt, is put into a pipkin, in whose sides a few odd holes have been knocked ; and the smokers crouch over it with hollow sticks, reeds, or tin tubes, each man to a hole, and puff away at the common bowl. It is not that the Russian 166 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. peasant does not care for his pipe ; but he has an uneasy consciousness that the luxurious narcotic is not for the likes of him. For him to fill the pipe of his lord and master, and roll the paper cigarettes; that should surely be sufficient. Havn't our British matrons somewhat similar feelings concerning their housemaid's ringlets ? This powerful mahorka is powerless against the Russian bug. That hateful brown-uniformed monster, who is voracious, blood-sucking, impudent, and evil- smelling enough to be a Russian functionary, and to have a grade in the Tchinn, laughs a horse-leech laugh at mahorka. He would smoke a pipe thereof without winking, I am convinced. I knew a lady in St. Peters- burg, whose sleeping apartment (hung with sky-blue silk, fluted, and forming one of a suite rented at two hundred roubles a month) was so infested with arch bugs, that she would have gone into a high fever for want of rest, if febrile symptoms had not been counter- acted by faintness from loss of blood. She was a buxom woman originally, and grew paler and paler every day. She tried camphor ; she tried vinegar ; she tried turpentine; she tried a celebrated vermin-annihilator powder, which had been given to her by my friend Nessim Bey (otherwise Colonel Washington Lafayette Bowie, U.S.), and which had been used with great success by that gallant condottiere while campaigning against the bugs and the Russians with Omer Pasha in Anatolia. But all was in vain. The brown vampires rioted on that fair flesh, and brought all their brothers, like American sight-seers. The lady was in despair, and applied, at last, to a venerable Russian friend, de- corated with the cross of St. Stanislas, second class, high up in the ministry of imperial appanages, and who had resided for more than half a century in St. Petersburg. * How can you kill bugs, general ?' (of course he was a general) she asked. CONCERNING BOOTS AND SHOES. 167 * Madame/ he answered, ' I think it might be done with dogs and a double-barrelled gun !' This, though hyperbolical, is really the dernier mot of the vermin philosophy. If you want to destroy bugs, you must either go to bed in plate-armour, and so, rolling about, squash them, or you must sit up patiently with a moderator-lamp, a cigar, and a glass of grog, and hunt them. You will be a mighty hunter before the morning. Don't be sanguine enough to imagine that you can kill the wretches with the mere finger and thumb. I have found a pair of snuffers serviceable in crushing their lives out. A brass wafer-stamp (if you have a strong arm and a sure aim) is not a bad thing to be down on them with ; I have heard a noose, or lasso of packthread, to snare and strangle them unawares, spoken of favourably ; but a hammer, and a ripping-chisel of the pattern used by the late Mr. Man- ning, are the best vermin annihilators. I think the Russian government ought to give a premium for every head of bugs brought to the chief police-office, as our Saxon kings used to do for wolves. Only I don't think the imperial revenue would quite suffice for the first week's premium were it but the tenth part of a copeck per cent. The subject of vermin always raises my ire, even when I fall across it accidentally. I have been so bitten I We can pardon a cripple for denouncing the vicious system of swaddling babies; and who could be angry with Titus Gates for declaiming against the iniquity of corporal punishment ? Unless I have made up my mind to take lodgings in the Boot Row of the Gostinnoi-dvor which as there are no dwelling-rooms there, would be but a cold- .ground lodging it is very nearly time for me, I opine, to leave off glozing over boots, and go elsewhere. But I could write a quarto about them. Once more, how- ever, like the thief at Tyburn, traversing the cart, often 168 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. taking leave, because loth to depart, I must claim 3 fresh, though brief reprieve ; for see ! here are the* children's boots ; and you who love the little people must come with me, and gaze. Such boot-vines ! such espaliers of shoes ! such pendant clusters of the dearest, tottiest, nattiest, gau- diest, miniatures of grown-men's boots, all intended for young Russia! Field-Marshals' boots, Chevalier Guards' boots, steppe boots, courier boots, cossack boots, Lesghian boots, Kasan boots, but all fitted to the puddy feet of the civil and military functionaries of the empire of Lilliput. Long live the Czar Tomas Thum- bovitch, second of the name ! And all the boots are picturesque ; for the Russians have a delightful cus- tom of dressing their little children, either in the quaint old Muscovite costume, or in the dress of some tribu- tary, or conquered, or mediatised nation. One of the Nous Autres adult, must wear, perforce, either some choking uniform, or else a suit from Jencens on the Nevskoi, and of the latest Parisian cut ; but, as a little boy from four to eight years old say (for, after that y he becomes a cadet, and is duly choked in a military uniform, and bonneted with a military head-dress), he- wears the charming costume of a little Pole, or a Cir- cassian, or a Lesghian, or a Mongol, or a Kirghiz, or EJ Cossack of the Don, the AVolga, the Oural, the Ukraine,, or the Taurida. Nothing prettier than to see these dumpy little Moscovs toddling along with their mam- mas* or their nurses, in the verdant alleys of the Summer Garden ; huge, flattened-pumpkin shaped. Cossack turban-caps, or Tartar tarbouches, or Vol- hynian Schliapas, or Armenian calpacks on their heads ' T their tiny bodies arrayed in costly little caftans, some of Persian silk stiff with embroidery, some of velvet, some of the soft Circassian camel and goat-hair fabrics, some of cloth of gold, or silver; with splendiferous little sashes, and jewelled cartouch-cases on their CONCERNING BOOTS AND SHOES. 169- breasts, and sparkling yataghans, and three-hilted. poniards (like Celtic dirks) ; and the multi-coloured little boots you see in the Gostinnoi-Dvor, made of scarlet, yellow, sky-blue, black- topped- with-red, and sometimes white leather, which last, with a little pair of gilt spurs, are really delectable to look upon. As- the children become older, these pretty dresses are thrown aside, and the boys become slaves (thrice-noble and slave-possessing though they be), and are ticketed, and numbered, and registered, and drilled, and taught many languages, and not one honest or ennobling thing ;. for the greater glory of God, and our Lord the Czar. Would you quarrel with me for liking children in fancy dresses? In truth, I love to see them as fantastically- gaily dressed as silk, and velvet, and gay colours, and artistic taste can make them. Never mind the cross- patches who sneer about us in England, and say our children look like little Highland kilt-stalkers, and little ballet-girls. I would rather that, than that they should look like little Quakers, or little tailors, or little bankers, or little beneficed clergymen, or t little donkies, which last-named is the similitude assumed by the asinine jacket, trousers, frill, and round hat. Dress up the children like the characters in the story- books. They don't belong to our world yet ; they are our living story-books in themselves, the only links we have between those glorious castles in the air and. these grim banks, talking-shops, and union workhouses,. on earth, here. I regret that the Russians do not oftener extend their picturesque choice of wardrobe to the little girls. Now and again, but very, very rarely,, I have seen some infant Gossudarinia some little lady of six or eight summers dressed in the long, straight, wide-sleeved farthingale, the velvet and jewelled ka- koschnik like the painted aureole of a Byzantine saint, the long lace veil, the broad girdle tied in an X knot at the stomacher, and the embroidered slippers with. 170 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. golden heels, which still form the costume de cour of the Russian ladies ; but in too many instances the per- nicious influence of Mesdames Zoe Falcon and Jessie Field, Marchandes des Modes, have been predominant ; ^ind the little girls are dressed after the execrable engravings in the fashion-books, in flimsy gauze and artificial flower bonnets, many-fringed mantelettes, many-flounced skirts, lace-edged pantalettes, open-work stockings (pink silk, of course !), and bronzed-kid bot- tines. I mind the time when little girls at home used to be dressed prettily, quaintly, like little gipsies or little Swiss shepherdesses ; but I shudder for the day now, when, returning to England, I shall see small Yenuses swaying down Regent Street with iron-hooped petticoats, and decapitated sugar-loaf-like Talmas, and birdcage bonnets half off their little heads. Why not have the paniers the real hoops back, ladies, at once : the red-headed mules, patches, hair-powder, and all the rest of the Louis Quinze Wardour-Street shoppery, not forgetting the petite soupers, and the Abbes, and the Madelonnettes, and the Pare aux Oerfs ? Be consistent. You borrow your hoops from the French ladies' great grandmothers are there no traditions of their morals to be imported, as good as new, in this year fifty-six ? To reform female costume is far beyond my powers. Much might be done, perhaps, by administering forty blows with a stick to every male worker in metals con- victed of forging steel sous-jupes, and by sentencing every female constructor of a birdcage bonnet to learn by heart the names and addresses of all the petitioners against Sunday park bands. Still I am moved by a humble ambition to introduce a new little-boy costume into my native country. Very many of the Russian gentry dress their children in the exact costume (in miniature) of our old friend the Ischvostchik, and few dresses, certainly, could be so picturesque, so quaint, CONCERNING BOOTS AND SHOES. 171 and so thoroughly Russian. There is a small nephew of mine somewhere on the southern English coast, and whom (supposing him to have surmounted that last jam-pot difficulty by this time) I intend, with his pa- rents' permission, to dress in this identical Ischvostchik's costume. I see, in my mind's eye, that young Christian walking down the High Street, the pride of his papa and mamma, clad in a gala costume of Muscovite fashioning a black velvet caftan with silver sugar-loaf buttons, and an edging of braid ; a regular-built Isch- vostchik's hat with a peacock's feather ; baggy little breeches of the bed-ticking design ; and little boots with scarlet tops ! Bran new, from the Gostinno'i-dvor have I the hats and boots. The custom-house officers of four nations have already examined and admired them, and doubtless in their tenderness for little boys have allowed them to pass duty free. There only remain the stern-faced men in the shabby coats at the Dover Douane, to turn my trunks into a Hampton Court maze, and I shall be able to bring those articles of apparel safely to the desired haven. Who knows but I may introduce a new fashion among the youth of this land ; that the apothecary, the lawyer, nay, the great mayor's wife of Bevistown, may condescend eventually to array her offspring after the fashion I set ! Lord Petersham had his coat, Count D'Orsay his hat, Blucher his boot, Hobson his choice, Howqua his mixture, Bradshaw his guide, Daffy his elixir, and Sir John Cutler his stockings, why may I not aspire to the day when, in cheap tailors' windows I may see a diminutive waxen figure arrayed in the Ischvostchik's costume I have imported and made popular ? Some of these little children's boots are quite mar- vels in the way of gold and silver embroidery. The Russians are nearly as skilful in this branch of industry as the Beguines of Flanders ; and since the general confiscation of ecclesiastical property by Catherine the 172 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. Second (who certainly adhered to the totoporcine prin* ciple in a right imperial manner), there have been many convents in the interior of Russia which have been self-supporting, and have even acquired ample revenues, through the skill of the nuns and the orphan girls whom they receive as inmates, in embroidery. Du reste 9 [Russians as a nation are adepts in elaborate handi- work imitative only, be it well understood. You must set them to work by pattern, for of invention they are comparatively barren ; but whether the thing to be imitated be a miniature by Isabey or an Aubusson carpet, a Limerick glove or a Napier's steam-engine, a Sevres vase or a Grecian column, an Enfield rifle or a chronometer by Mr. John Bennett of Cheapside,, they will turn you out a copy, so close, so faithfully followed in its minutest details, that you will have considerable difficulty in distinguishing the original from the duplicate. There is an immense leaven of the Chinese Tartar in the Tartar-Russian. The small eyes, the high cheek-bone, sallow complexions and nervous gesticulation, I will not insist upon ; the simi- larities are so ethnologically obvious.* But there are many more points of resemblance between the Russians and the Chinese. Both people are habitually false and thievish, both are faithless in diplomacy, bragging in success, mendacious in defeat, cruel and despotic always- Both nations are jealous of, and loathe, yet imitate, the manners and customs of strangers; both have an ex- aggerated and idolatrous emperor-worship, and Joss- worship ; both are passionately addicted to tea, fire- works, graven images, and the use of the stick as a penal remedy. Both have enormous armies on paper, and tremendous fleets in harbour, and forts impreg- nable (till they are taken, after which misadventure they turn up to have been nothing but mere block- * It should be taken into consideration that of ethnology, as a science, I am totally ignorant. CONCERNING BOOTS AND SHOES. 173 houses); both nations are slaves to a fatiguing and silly etiquette ; both are outwardly polite and inwardly barbarous ; both are irreclaiinably wedded to a fidgety, elaborately-clumsy, system of centralisation boards of punishments, boards of rewards, boards of dignities. Both, in organisation, are intensely literary and acade- mical, and, in actuality, grossly ignorant. The Chinese liave the mandarin class system ; the Russians have the Tchinn with its fourteen grades both bureaucratic pyramids, stupendous and rotten. The Chinese bam- boo their wives ; the Russians bamboo their wives (' And so do the English,' I hear a critic say : but neither Russian nor Chinese incurs the risk of six months at the treadmill for so maltreating his spouse). In both empires there is the same homogeneous nullity on the part of the common people I mean forty mil- lions or so, feeding and fighting and being oppressed and beaten like ONE, without turning a hair in the scale of political power ; and here I bring my parallel triumphantly to a close both nations possess a lan- guage which, though utterly and radically dissimilar, are both copious, both written in incomprehensible cha- racters, both as arbitrary in orthography and pronun- ciation as their emperors are arbitrary in power, and both difficult, if not impossible, [of perfect acquisition by western Europeans. I declare, as an honest tra- veller, holding up my hand in the court of criticism, and desirous of being tried by Lord Chief Justice Aristarehus and my [country, that I never passed a week in Russia without thinking vividly of what I had read about the Celestial Empire ; that it was impossible to read the list of nominations, promotions, preferments, and decorations in the Pekin I beg pardon I mean the St. Petersburg Gazette, without thinking of the mandarins, and the peacocks' feathers, and the blue buttons, and the yellow girdles ; that the frequent ap- plication of the stick was wonderfully like the rice-paper 174 A JOURISTEY DUE NORTH. representations of the administration of the bamboo ; that the ' let it be so ' at the end of an oukase of the Russian Czar, struck me as being own rhetorical bro- ther to the ' respect this ' which terminates the yellow- poster proclamations of the Chinese emperor. I must do the Russians the justice to admit that they do not attempt to tell the time of day by the cat's eyes ; and that, though arrant boasters, they are not the miserable cowards the Chinese are. As a people, and collectively, the Russians are brave in the highest degree ; but it is in their imitative skill that the Rus- sians, while they excel, so strongly resemble their Mantchou-Tartar cousins. They have, it is true, a sufficient consciousness of the fitness of things to avoid falling into the absurd errors to which the Chinese, from their slavish adherence to a given pattern, are liable. They do not, if a cracked but mended tea-cup be sent them as a model, send home an entire tea- service duly cracked and mended with little brass clamps ; they do not make half-a-dozen pair of nan- keen pantaloons, each with a black patch in the seat, because the originals had been so repaired ; neither do they carefully scrape the nap off a new dress-coat at the seams, in faithful imitation of the threadbare model ; but, whatever you choose to set before a Russian, from millinery to murder, from architecture to arsenic, that will he produce in duplicate with the most won- derful skill and fidelity. There is, to be sure, always something wanting in these wondrous Russian copies. In their pictures, their Corinthian columns, their Ver- sailles fountains, their operas, their lace bonnets, there is an indefinable soupgon of candle-grease and bears* hides, and the North Pole, and the man with the bushy beard who had to work at these fine things for nothing because he was a slave. Can you imagine a wed- ding trousseau, all daintily displayed all satin, gauze, orange flowers, Brussels lace, and pink rosettes which THE SLOBODA. A RUSSIAN VILLAGE. 175 had been clumsily handled by some Boy Jones? Imagine'the marks of thumbs and greasy sooty fingers dimly disfiguring the rich textures ! That, to me, is Russian civilisation. X. THE SLOBODA. A RUSSIAN VILLAGE. THIS is the Sloboda, or village, say of Volnoi-Volosch- tchok, and there are five hundred villages like it. Still you are to know that Volnoi-Voloschtchok is some twenty imperial versts from the government town of Rjew, in the government of Twer, and as all men should know, about half-way to Moscow the Holy ; the Starai, or old town, as the Russians lovingly term it, and which holds the nearest place in their affections to Kieff the Holiest, which they call the mother of Russian cities. This, then, is the seigneural sloboda of Volnoi (as we will conclude to call it, for shortness) ; and you are now to hear all about it, and its lord and master. I have come from Twer on the Volga, on what, in Bohemian euphuism, is known as the Grand Scud. This, though difficult of exact translation, may be ac- cepted as implying a sort of purposeless journeying a viatorial meandering a pilgrimage to the shrine of our Lady of Haphazard an expedition in which charts, compasses, and chronometers have been left behind as needless impediments, and in which any degree of latitude the traveller may happen to find himself in, is cheerfully accepted as an accomplished fact. On the Grand Scud then, with a pocket-book pass- ably well lined with oleaginous rouble notes, and a small wardrobe in a leathern bag, I have come with my friend, ALEXIS HARDSHELLOVITCH. You start at my fellow-traveller's patronymic, sounding, as it does, much more of a New York oyster-cellar than of a district in the government of Twer. Here is the meaning of Hardshellovitch. Alexis, though a noble Russian of 176 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. innumerable descents, and of unmistakeable Tartar lineage, though wearing (at St. Petersburg), the rigorous helmet, sword, and choking suit ; though one of the corps of imperial pages, and hoping to be a hussar of Grodno by this time next year, is in speech, habits, and manners, an unadulterated citizen of the smartest nation in the creation. For Alexis' father, the general, was for many years Russian Minister Plenipotentiary at Washington in the district of Hail Columbia ! IT. S. While there, he very naturally fell in love with, and married, one of the beautiful young daughters of that land ; and Alexis was the satis- factory result. After a hesitation of some seventy years' standing, the general diplomatically made his mind up to die, and his family availed themselves of the circumstance to bury him. Madame the ex- Ambassadress remained in Washington, and his son, being destined for the Russian service, was sent to St. Petersburg to be educated. Fancy the young Anacharsis being sent from Athenian Academe to be educated among the Scythians ; or imagine Mrs. Hobson Newcome, of Bryanstone Square, sending one of her dear children to be brought up among the Zulu Kaffirs ! The unfortunate Alexis was addressed, with care, to two ancient aunts (on the Muscovite side), in the Italianskaia Oulitsa at St. Petersburg. These ladies were of the old Russian way of thinking ; spoke not a word of French ; took grey snuff; drank mint brandy, and fed the young neophyte (accustomed to the luxurious fare of a diplomatic cuisine and Washington table d'hotes), on Stchi (cabbage soup), batwinja (cold fish soup), pirogues (meat pies), and kvass. He had been used to sit under the Reverend Dr. D. Slocum Whittler (Regenerated-Rowdy persuasion), in a ^neat whitewashed temple, where lyric aspirations to Zion were sung to the music of Mdore's Melodies; he suddenly found himself in a land where millions of THE SLOBODA. A RUSSIAN VILLAGE. 177 people bow down billions of times every day to trillions of sacred Saracens' heads. He was soon removed to the Ecole des Pages that grand, gilt, gingerbread structure (I do not call it so as in any way reflecting on its flimsiness, but because it is, outwardly, the exact colour of under-done gingerbread, profusely orna- mented with gold-leaf), in the Sadovva'ia, and which was formerly the palace of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem. Here, he found French, German, and English professors ; but though he has been four years a page, the poor lad has been in a continual state of bewilderment ever since he left America. He has scarcely, as yet, mastered the first flight of the -Giant's Staircase of Russian lexicology ; the Russian gift of tongues seems denied to him ; his French smacks of German, and his German of French ; and his English, which, miserable youth, is of all languages the one he delights most to speak, is getting into an ancient and fishy condition. He misses his grammatical tip, fre- quently. He has an extensive salad of languages in his head ; but he has broken the vinegar-cruet, and mislaid the oil- flask, and can't find the hard-boiled eggs. All his sympathies are Anglo-Saxon. He likes roast meat, cricket, boating, and jovial conversation ; and he is, hand and foot, a slave to the Dutch-doll-with-an-iron- mask discipline of the imperial pages, and the imperial court, and the imperial prisoners-van and county-gaol system generally. He is fond of singing comic songs. He had better not be too funny in Russia ; there is a hawk with a double head in the next room. He is (as far as he has sense enough to be) a republican in principle. The best thing he can do is to learn by heart, and keep repeating the Anglican litany, substi- tuting Good Czar for Good Lord. What a terrible, state of things for an inoffensive and well-meaning young man ! Not to know whether he is on his head, or his heels, morally. To be neither flesh, nor fowl,. N 178 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. -nor good red herring, nationally. I wonder how many . years it will take him to become entirely Russian : how long he will be before he will learn to dance, and perform the ceremony of the kou-tou I mean the court bow and leave off telling the truth, keeping the eighth commandment, and looking people straight in the face. Not very long, I am afraid. The Russian academical course of moral ethics is but a short curriculum ; and, once matriculated, you graduate rapidly. In no other country but Russia not even in our own sunsetless empire, with its myriad tributaries can you find such curious instances of denationalisation. Alexis Hard- shellovitch had a friend, whose acquaintance I had also the honour of making, who was also in the Corps des Pages, and who came to samovarise, or take tea with us, one evening, in patent-leather boots and white kid gloves ; and who talked so prettily about poticho- manie and Mademoiselle Bagdanoff, the ballet-dancer (all in the purest Parisian), that I expected the next subjects of his conversation would be Shakspeare and the musical glasses. What do you imagine his name was ? Genghis Khan ! (pronounced Zinghis Khan). He was of the creamiest Tartar extraction, and minc- ingly confessed that he was descended in a direct line from that conqueror. He was a great prince at home ; but the Russians had mediatised him, and he was to be an officer in the Mussulman escort of the Czar. He had frequently partaken of roast horse in his boyhood, and knew where the best tap of mares' milk was, down Mongolian-Tartary way, I have no doubt ; but I have seen him eat ices at Dominique's on the Nevskoi with much grace, and he was quite a lady's man. Alexis Hardshellovitch does not feel his exceptional and abnormal position to any painful extent ; inasmuch as, though one of the worthiest and most amiable fellows alive, he is a tremendous fool. He is a white Russian not coming from White Russia, understand, THE SLOBODA. A RUSSIAN VILLAGE. 179 but with white eyelashes, and fawn-coloured hair, and a suety complexion, and eyes that have not been warranted to wash, for they have run terribly, and the ground-colour has been quite boiled out of them. He has a glimmering, but not decided notion, of his want of brains himself. ' I know I am ugly/ he can- didly says, 'my dear good mother always told me so, and my father, who was lei homme, used to hit me cracks because I had such large ears. I must be ugly, because the Director of the Corps has never selected me to be sent to the palace as a page of the chamber. I should like to be a page of the chamber, for they wear chamarrures of gold bullion on their skirts behind ; but they only pick out the handsome pages. They say I should give the Empress an attack of nerves with my ears. Yet I am a general and ambassador's son. I, Some ' He spits. ' But I'm not a fool. No ; I guess not. Prince Bouillabaissoff says I am a lete ; but Genghis Khan tells me that I have the largest head of all the imperial pages. How can I be a fool with such a large head ? Tell.' The honest youth has, it must be admitted, an enormous nut. Though I love him for his goodness and simplicity, I am conscious always of an uneasy desire to take that head of his between my hands, as if it were indeed a nut, and of the cocoa species, and crack it against a stone wall, to see if there be any milk to be accounted for, inside. I have been staying, in this broiling midsummer mad-dog weather, at the hospitable country mansion of Alexis Hardshell ovitch's aunts ; and we two have come on the Grand Scud in a respectable old caleche, sup- posed to have been purchased in France by the diplo- matic general during the occupation of Paris by the allies in eighteen hundred and fifteen. It has been pieced and repaired by two generations of Russian coach-cobblers since ; has been re-lined with some fancy N2 180 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. stuff which I believe to have been, in the origin, win- dow-curtains ; the vehicle, probably, has not been painted since the Waterloo campaign, but the wheels- are plentifully greased ; we have an ample provision of breaks, and drags, and ' skids ;' we have three capital horses one a little black Bitchok lithe, limber, long- maned, and vicious, but an admirable galloper, and dressee a la volee, and we have a very paragon of a postilion or coachman, I scarcely know whether to call him Ischvostchik or Jemstchik, for now he sits on the box, and now he bestrides the splashboard, where the splinter-bar is his brother, and the traces make acquaint- ance with his boots. I say he is a paragon ; for he can go a week without getting drunk, never falls asleep on the box, and however bad the roads may be, never lands the caleche in a deep hole. Inexhaustibly good- tempered and untiringly musical he is, of course ; he- would not be a Russian else. He belongs to Alexis or rather, will do so at his majority ; when that large- headed page will possess much land and many beeves human beeves, I mean, with beards and boots, and baggy breeches. But I don't think that Alexis will administer much STICK to his slaves when he comes to his kingdom. He has a hard shell, but a soft heart. It is lucky we have Petr' Petrovitch the paragon with us in our journey from Rjew. for we have long left the great Moscow Road (I don't speak of the rail but of the chaussee), and have turned into an abomi- nable Sentier de Traverse, a dreadful region, where marshes have had the black vomit, and spumed lumps of misshapen raven-like forest black roots of trees inky jungles, so to speak. Can you imagine anything more horrible than a dwarf forest for the trees are never tall hereabout stems and branches hugger- muggering close together like conspirators weaving some diabolical plot, with here and there a gap of marsh pool between the groups of trees, as if some woodland THE SLOBODA. A KUSSIAN VILLAGE. 181 criminals, frightened at their own turpitude, had de- spairingly drowned themselves, and ridded the earth of their black presence. Some corpses 'of these float on the surface of the marsh, but the summer time has been as merciful to them as the red-breasts were to the children in the wood, and has covered them with a green pall. There must be capital teal, and widgeon, and snipe-shooting here in autumn shooting enough to .satisfy that insatiate sportsman, Mr. Ivan Tourguenieff; but, at present, the genus homo does not shoot. He is .shot by red-dart, from the inexhaustible quiver of the sun. He does not hunt ; he is hunted by rolling clouds of pungent dust, by disciplined squadrons of gnats, and by flying cohorts of blue-bottles and gadflies. The sun has baked the earth into angular clods, and our caleche -and horses go hopping over the acclivities like a daddy- long-legs weak in the knee-joints over a home-baked crusty loaf. There is no cultivation in this part no trees no houses. I begin to grow as hotly thirsty as on that famous day when I drank out of POT, walking twenty miles, from Lancaster to Preston ; but out of -evil cometh good in Russian travelling. As you are perfectly certain, before starting, that you will not find any houses of entertainment on the road, except at stated distances ; and that the refreshments provided there will probably be intolerable, no person in a sane mental condition either rides or drives a dozen miles in the country without taking with him a complete ap- paratus for inward restoration. We have a comfortable .square box covered with tin, which unthinking persons might rashly assume to be a dressing-case, but which in reality contains a pint-and-a-half samovar ; a store of .fine charcoal thereunto belonging ; a tchainik, or tea- pot of terra cotta, tea-cups, knives, forks, and tea- canister. If we were real Russians hot as it is we should incite Petr' Petrovitch to kindle a fire, heat the .samovar, and set to tea- drinking with much gusto. As 182 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. we have Anglo-Saxon notions, if not blood, we resort to that other compartment of the tin chest where the mighty case-bottle of cold brandy and water is large',, squab, flat, and fitting into the bottom of the box. Then, each lighting a papiros, we throw ourselves back in the caleche. Petr' Petrovitch has not been forgotten in the case-bottle line, and we bid our conductor to resume the grandest of Scuds. We have an indefinite idea that we shall come upon one of Prince Bouillabais- soff s villages in an hour or so. This, too, is about the time to tell you that Alexis, though an imperial page, is clad in a Jim Crow hat, a baker/s jacket, nankeen pantaloons, and a Madras handkerchief loosely tied round his turn-down shirt-collar. These are the vaca- tions of the imperial pages very long vacations they have from May to August, and once in the country, Alexis may dress as he pleases ; but in St. Petersburg,, it would be as much as his large ears are worth to- appear without the regulation choke-outfit the sword,, casque, belt, and, to use an expression of Mumchance, ' coat buttoned up to here.' Friend of my youth ! why canst thou not come with me from the Rents of Tatty- boys to All the Russias ? For here thou wouldst find,, not one or two, but millions of men, all with their coats- buttoned up to here. I said ONE of Prince BouillabaissofFs villages, for the prince is a proprietor on a large scale, and owns- nearly a dozen, containing in all some twenty hundred douscha (souls) or serfs. But our Grand Scud principle is vindicated when we diverge from the marshes and the baked clods into the commencement of a smooth well- kept road, and learn from Petr' Petrovitch, whom we have hitherto foreborne interrogating, that we are ap- proaching the village of M. de Katorichassoff. The good Russian roads are oases between deserts^ In the immediate vicinity of the seigneur's residence the roads are beautifully kept. No English park avenue THE SLOBODA. A RUSSIAN VILLAGE. 183~ could surpass them in neatness, regularity, smoothness nay, prettiness and cheerfulness. There are velvety platebandes of greensward by the roadside, and graceful poplars, and sometimes elms. But once out of the baron's domains, and even the outlying parts of his territory, the roads high and bye become the pitiable paths of travail and ways of tribulation, of which I have hinted in the Czar's Highway. There is a hu- morous fiction that the proprietors of the soil are bound to keep the public roads in order, and another legend but more satirical than humorous that the govern- ment pays a certain yearly sum for the well-keeping of the roads. Government money is an ignis fatuical and impalpable thing in Russia. You may pay, but you do not receive. As to the proprietors they will see the government barbacued before they will do anything they are not absolutely compelled to do ; and the upshot of the matter is, that a problem something like the following is offered for solution. If two parties are bound to perform a contract of mutual service, and neither party performs it, which party has a right to complain ? M. de Katorichassoff, however or rather Herr Van- dergutlers, his North German bourmister, or intendant, for the noble Barynn is no resident just now (Hombourg, roulette, and so forth) would very soon know the reason why all the roads about the seigneurial village were not kept in apple-pie order. They say that in Tsarskoe-Selo palace gardens, near Petersburg, there is a corporal of invalids to run after every stray leaf that has fallen from a tree, and a police officer to take every unauthorised pebble on the gravel walks into custody. Without going so far as this, it is certain that there are plenty of peasants mis a corvee, that is, working three compulsory days' labour for the lord, to mend and trim the roads, clip the platebandes, and prune the trees ; and the result is, ultimately, a 184 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. charmingly umbrageous avenue through which we make our entrance into Volnoi-Voloschtchok. Though M. de K. (you will excuse the rest of the name, I know) has only one village, he has determined to do everything in it en grand seigneur. He has a church and a private police-station, and a common granary for corn ; and, wonder of wonders ! he has a wooden watch-tower surmounted by a circular iron bal- cony, and with the customary apparatus of telegraphic signals in case of fire. As you can see the whole of the village of Volnoi its one street, the chateau of the Barynn, and the mill of Mestrophan-Kouprianoritch at one glance, standing on the level ground, and as there are no other buildings for ten miles round, the utility of a watch-tower does not seem very obvious. Still, let us have discipline, or die. So there were watchmen, I suppose, at one time; but the balcony is tenantless now, and one of the yellow balls is in a position, according to the telegraphic code, denoting a raging conflagration somewhere. There is nothing on fire, that I know of, except the sun. Where is the watchman, too ? There are plenty of vigorous old men with long white beards, who would enact to the life, the part of that dreary old sentinel in Agamemnon the King, who, in default of fire, or water, or the enemy, or whatever else he is looking out for, prognosticates such dismal things about Clytemnestra's goings on and the state of Greece generally. Why didn't the terrible queen kill that old bore, at the same time she murdered her husband ? He has been prosing from that watch- tower going on three thousand years. There seems to be no necessity, either, for the watch-tower to have any windows, but broken ones, or any door save four shame- ful old planks hanging by one wooden hinge, and for the hot sun to glare fiercely through crevices in the walls that have not been made by the wood shrink- ing, but by the absence of part or parcel of the walls THE SLOBODA. A RUSSIAN VILLAGE. 185 themselves. Why empty balcony, why broken windows, why wooden hinges, why one hinge, why yawning walls ? This : the lord is at Hombourg ( actress of the Folies Dramatiques run of ill-luck on the red, and so forth), and Herr Vandergutlers, his intendant's, paramount business is to send him silver roubles. More silver roubles, and yet more ! So those of his serfs who pay him a yearly rent, or obrok, have had that obrok considerably increased; and those who were a corvee have been compelled to go upon obrok ; and every- body, man, woman, and child, patriarch and young girl, have been pinched, pressed, screwed, and squeezed, beaten, harassed, cozened, bullied, driven, and dragged by the North German intendant for more silver roubles more silver roubles still for M. de Katorichassoff, at Hombourg. There the man who deals the cards, and the woman who rouges her face, divide the Russian prince's roubles between them (a simple Seigneur here, he is Prince Katorichassoff at Hombourg) ; and this is why, you can understand, that the fire-engine department has been somewhat neglected, and its ope- ration suspended at Volno'i-Voloschtchok. As for the state of decay into which the building, though barely two years old, is falling, that is easily accounted for. The villagers are stealing it piecemeal. They have already stolen the lower part of the staircase, and thereby have been too clever for themselves, as they cannot get at the balcony, which, being of real iron, must make their mouths water. The hinges were ori- ginally made of wood, together with all the clamps, and rivets, and bolts employed in the lower part of the structure, through a knowledge of the fact patent and notorious, that iron anywhere within his reach is as much too much for the frail morality of a Russian peasant as of a South Sea native. He will steal the iron tires off wheels : he will (and has frequently) stolen the chains of suspension-bridges. I don't think he would object 186 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. to being loaded with chains, if he could steal and sell his fetters. On domains like those of Prince Bouillabaissoff, the fire-engine and watch-tower organisation is not a weak- minded caricature, but an imposing reality. And the importance of such a preventive establishment can with difficulty be exaggerated. Of course, his dwelling being of wood, and easily ignitable, the Russian is in- credibly careless with combustibles. It is one large tinder-box. This is why fire-insurance companies do not flourish in Russia. It may certainly be asked what special reason the Russian has for adopting any pre- cautions against conflagrations. Many reasons he certainly has not. He has about the same personal interest in his house as a pig might have in his sty. His breeder must give him four walls to live in, and a trough to eat his grains from, but he maybe driven to market any day he may be Pork (and well-scored for the bakehouse) by next Wednesday week. Again his house is not unlike a spider's web easily destroyed, easily reconstructed. The housemaid's broom, or the destroying element it is all the same ; a little saliva to the one, and a few logs to the other, and the spider and the moujik are at work again. You don't ask a baby to mend his cradle. When it is past service papa goes out and buys him a new one. There is this pater- nal relation between the lord and the serf (besides the obvious non-rod-sparing to avoid the child-spoiling one) that the former is to a certain extent compelled to provide for the material wants of his big-bearded bantling. If Ivan's roof be burnt over his head, the lord must find him at least the materials for another habitation ; if the harvests have fallen short, or an epizootis has decimated the country-side, he must feed them. The serf tills the ground for his lord, but he must have seeds given him to sow with. The Russian peasant having absolutely no earthly future to look THE SLOBODA. A RUSSIAN VILLAGE. 187 forward to, it is hut reasonable that his proprietor should supply the exigent demands of the present moment. There is no absolute right of existence guaranteed ; but the master's natural interest in the Souls he possesses having means sufficient to keep their bodies alive withal, obviously prompts him to keep- them fed, and housed, and clothed. There are his lands ; when they have done their three days' work for him, they may raise enough corn in the next three days' serviat to make their black bread with. There are his hernp, and flax, and wool, their women can spin, themselves can weave such hodden grey as they require to cover their nakedness. There are his secular woods ; they may cut pine-logs there to make their huts. As regards the rigid necessary the bare ele- ments of food, covering, and shelter, the a nobility 's- serfs have decidedly the same advantage over the twenty millions or so of crown slaves (facetiously termed free peasants) as Mr. Legree's negroes have over the free-born British paupers of Buckinghamshire, or Gloucestershire, or out with it St. James's, West- minster, and St. George's, Hanover Square. In a crown village, in a time of scarcity, the sufferings of the free peasants are almost incredibly horrible. Then, the wretched villagers, after having eaten their dogs, their cats, and the leather of their boots ; after being seen, scraping together handfuls of vermin to devour ; after going out into the woods, and gnawing the bark off the trees ; after swallowing clay and weeds to deceive their stomachs ; after lying in wait, with agonised wistfulness, for one solitary traveller to whom they can lift their hands to beg alms ; after having undergone all this, they go forth from their famine-stricken houses into the open fields and waste places, and those that are sicken- ing, build a kind of tilt awning-hut with bent twigs covered with rags, over those that are sick, and they rot first, and die afterwards. In famines such as these 188 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. the people turn black, like negroes ; whole families go naked ; and though, poor wretches, they would steal the nails from horses' shoes, the crank and staple from SL gibbet, or the trepanning from a man's skull, they refrain wondrously from cannibalism, from mutual violence, and from anything like organised depreda- tions on the highway ; they fear the Czar and the police to the last gasp. Nor, do I conscientiously believe, if the richest shrines of the richest Sabors of .all Petersburg, Moscow, Kieff, and Novgorod heavy with gold and silver, and blazing with costly jewels were to be set up in the midst of their breadless, co- peckless, village, would they abstract one jewelled knob from the crozier of a saint, one tinselled ray from the aureole of the Panagia. At last, when many have died, and many more are dying, a stifled wail, which has penetrated with much difficulty through the official cotton-stuffed ears of district police auditoria, district -chambers of domains, military chiefs of governments, -and imperial chancelleries without number, comes soughing into the private cabinet of the Czar at the Winter Palace or Peterhoff. The Empress, good soul, -sheds tears when she hears of the dreadful sufferings of the poor people so many hundred versts off. The imperial children, I have no doubt, wonder why, if the peasants have no bread to eat, they don't take to plum- -cake ; the emperor is affected, but goes to work ; issues .a Prikaz ; certain sums from the. imperial cassette -are munificently affected to the relief of the most press- ing necessities. Do you know, my reader, that long months elapse before the imperial alms reach their wretched objects? do you know that the imperial bounty is bandied all in strict accordance with official formality, of the like of which I have heard some- thing nearer home from department to department from hand to hand ; and that to each set of greasy .fingers, belonging to scoundrels in gold lace, and rogues THE SLOBODA. A RUSSIAN VILLAGE. 18$ with stars and crosses, and knaves of hereditary nobi- lity, there sticks a certain percentage on the sum originally allocated ? The Czar gives, and gives gene- rously. The Tchinn lick, and mumble, and paw the precious dole, and when, at last, it reaches its rightful recipients, it is reduced to a hundredth of its size^ Do you know one of the chief proverbs appertaining and peculiar to Russian serfdom ? it is this ' Heaven? is too high, the Czar is too far off.' To whom are the miserable creatures to cry? To Mumbo-Jumbovitch their priest, who is an ignorant and deboshed dolt,, generally fuddled with kvass, who will tell them to> kiss St. Nicholas's great toe ? To the nearest police- major, who will give them fifty blows with a stick, if they are troublesome, and send them about their busi- ness ? To the Czar, who is so far off, morally and physically ? To Heaven ? Such famines as these have been in crown-villages, on the great chaussee road from Petersburg to Moscow. Such famines have been,, to our shame be it said, in our own free, enlightened^ and prosperous United Kingdom, within these dozen* years. But I am not ashamed ! No ! pot-and-kettle philosophers, sympathisers with the oppressed Hindoo- No ! inote-and-beam logicians full of condolence with the enslaved Irishman I am not ashamed to talk of famines in Russia, because there have been famines in Skibbereen, and Orkney, and Shetland. Our famine- stricken people may have been neglected, oppressed, wronged, by stupid and wicked rulers ; but 1 am not ashamed I am rather proud to remember the burst of sympathy elicited from the breasts of millions among us, at the first recital of the sufferings of their bre- thren the strenuous exertions made by citizens of every class and every creed to raise and send imme- diate succour to those who were in want. We commit great errors as a nation, but we repair them nobly ;. and I think we ought no more to wince at being re- 190 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. minded of our former backslidings, or refrain from denouncing and redressing wrongs wherever they exist, because, in the old time, we have done wrongfully our- selves than we ought to go in sackcloth and ashes because Richard the Third murdered his nephews, or abstain from the repression of cannibalism in New -Zealand, because our Druidical ancestors burnt human beings alive in wicker cages.* XL A COUNTRY HOUSE. I WANT to say a word more about Ireland, not argu- mentative^, but as an illustration. I should have been dishonest in blinking Skibbereen ; the more so, as in all the narratives I have heard of the social characteristics of these appalling visitations, I could not help being struck with their grim and minute similitude to some features of the Irish famine that came within my own knowledge at the time. Some of the coincidences were extraordinary. The patience of the people. Their swarthiness of hue from inanition. Their patience and meekness during unexampled agony ; and, above all, their nakedness. To be naked and a-hungered would * The impressions hereabove set down respecting famine, and, indeed, most of the information on the subject of the condition of the Russian peasantry which may hereafter be found in these pages, are derived, not from official documents, not even from the trustworthy pages of M. de Haxthausen, who though professedly favourable to the Russian government, and painting, as far as he can, couleur de rose, lets out some very ugly truths occasionally ; but from repeated conversations I have held with Russian gentle- men, some high in office in ministerial departments, some men of scientific attainments, some university students, some military officers. All the facts I have rested my remarks upon have been told me with a calm, complacently-indifferent air, over tumblers of tea, and paper cigarettes, and usually accompanied by a remark of c'est comme ga. And I think I kept my eyes sufficiently wide open during my stay, and was pretty well able to judge when my interlocutors were lying, and when they were telling the truth. A COUNTRY HOUSE. 191 seem to be natural the hungry man selling his clothes to buy bread ; but these people, Irish and Russian, went naked when they had plenty of rags, unsaleable, but warmth-containing. There seem to be certain extreme stages of human misery, in which a man can no longer abide his garments. I have a curious remembrance of being told by a relative, who was in the famine-stricken districts in eighteen forty-seven, that, once losing his way over a mountain, he entered a cabin to inquire the proper road, and there found seven people of both sexes, children and adults, crouching round an empty saucepan, and all as bare as robins I The eldest girl, who volun- teered to show him the straight road, was modest as Irish girls are proud to be, and as she rose to escort him, clapped a wooden bowl over her shoulder, as if it had been the expansive cloak of the demon page whom we read of in the Percy Reliques. I have been thinking of all these things and a great many more over tea and tobacco in the Starosta's house in M. de Katorichassoff's village. There Alexis and I are comfortably seated during the noon-tide heats. The Starosta's daughter would have washed our feet for us, as Penelope's handmaidens did for Ulysses, or Fergus Maclvor's dhuinie-wassals for Waverley, if we had had any inclination that way. Perhaps I had corns ; perhaps A lexis, already becoming Russianised, had, like many of his patent leather-booted countrymen, no stock- ings on. It is certain that we did not avail ourselves of the footbath. The Starosta has informed us several times, and with as many profound bows, that his house no longer belongs to him, but that it, its contents, him- self, his children and grandchildren, are ours, and at the absolute disposal of our excellencies. Excellencies ! By the long-winded multisyllabic, but mellifluous epithets he has bestowed on Alexis he must have called him his majesty, his coruscation, his scintillation, his milky-way, by this time. The Russians are great pro- 192 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. ficients in low bows, and to lien savoir tirer la reverence is considered a superlative accomplishment. A dis- tinguished Professor of Natural History attached to the University of Moscow a great savant and a very taci- turn man once remarked to rne gravely, that his brother Waldemar made the best bow of any boyard in the government of Simbersk, and added : ' Cegarqon la fera son chemiri and indeed this is a country where,, by dint of continuous and assiduous bowing, you may make surprising way in fortune and dignity. If you will bow low enough you may be sure to rise high in- the Tchinn ; and if you don't mind grovelling a little on your stomach, and swallowing a little dust, there is- no knowing to what imperial employment you may aspire. I think that Alexis has a secret admiration and envy of Genghis Khan, owing to the profoundly graceful bows that Tartar chieftain is so frequently making. I don't mind low bows. Perhaps if I knew an English duke I should be inclined to make him very low bows myself at all events, I have compatriots who would ^ but it is inexpressibly painful and disgusting to a western, traveller in Russia, when he happens to be on a visit at a gentleman's country house, to see stalwart bearded men positively falling down and worshipping some- scrubby young seigneur. If a peasant has the slightest favour to ask of his lord the promotion of his wife, for instance, from the scullery to the fine-linen laundry he begins his suit by falling plump on his knees, and touching the earth with his forehead. Even in Peters- burg where Nous Autres do not like to show the slave- owner's element more than they can help, I have seen a sprightly young seigneur keep a grey-haired servitor full ten minutes on his knees before him lighting his pipe cheerfully calling him swinia and durac (pig and fool) meanwhile, and playfully chucking him under the chin with the toe of his Kasan boot. We have refused the refreshment of vitchina, or A COUNTRY HOUSE. 193 dried pork, piroga, or meat pies, and ogourtzhoff, or .salted cucumbers; but we have cheerfully accepted the offer of a samovar, which, huge, brazen, and bat- tered, glowers in the midst of the table like the giant helmet in the Castle of Otranto. We have our own tea and cups in the tin chest, but the Starosta won't liear of our using either. He has tea and capital tea it is rather like tobacco in colour, and tasting slightly as if it had been kept in a canister in Mr. Atkinson the perfumer's shop ; besides this, he has, not tumblers for us to drink our tea from, but some articles lie has the greatest pride and joy in producing por- ne of the villages where this splendacious costume is to be seen. That there is a Lake of Ladoga, I know ; and a village by the name of Novai'a Ladoga is probable ; but I am apprehensive that the way to that village on gala days is difficult, and dangerous, and doubtful ; that the only way to go to it is ' straight down the crooked lane, and all round the square ;' and that the Pentecost-time, when the village maidens walk about in cloth of gold, red morocco shoes, and diamond ear-rings, will be in the year of Beranger's millenium. xm. HEYDE'S. THE widow Heyde is dead, and Zaccharai* reigns in her stead; but Heyde's is still: even as Tom and Joe's coffee-houses in London are still so called, though Tom and Joe have been sleeping the sleep of the just these hundred years, and Jack and Jerry may be the tapsters now, in their place. So Heyde, being dead, is Heyde still. Le roi est mort ! vive le roi ! That beefsteak and trimmings with which on board the little pyroscaphe that brought me to this Vampire Venice this Arabian Nightmare this the reality of Coleridge's distempered, opium-begotten Xanadu ; (for here of a surety lives, or lived, the Kubla Khan who decreed the stately pleasure dome, and possessed the caverns measureless to man, through which ran that river down to the sunless sea:) that beefsteak and trimmings, rouble-costing, with which coming to Xanadu . I mean St. Petersburg I was incautious enough to feed the wide-mouthed Petersen, did not turn out wholly unproductive to me. The quality of that beefsteak and etceteras was not strained. It may, or it may not have fallen like the gentle dew from Heaven on Petersen : but it undeniably blessed him that gave and him that received it. Petersen's stomach was R 2 244 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. filled, his wide mouth satisfied ; so he was blessed r the gratitude of repletion (I have seen a tiger in a menagerie wink like the most beneficent of charity- dinner stewards after a more than ordinarily succulent shin-bone), the beatitude of fulness led him to bestow on me a small, ragged, and dirty scrap of paper, onv which was scrawled in German, and in something 1 thought at first to be the mere caligraphic midsummer madness of Petersen, but which I afterwards discovered to be his best Russ these words, ' Heyde's Cadetten- linie, Wassily-Ostrow young Mr. Trobbener's recom- mendation at J. Petersen.' Who the mysterious young Mr. Trobbener was, I never was able to discover. Did Petersen recommend him, or he Petersen ? Were Petersen and Trobbener the same personages ? Was* Petersen himself young Mr. Petersen, or old Mr; Petersen ? Was he of any age, or for all time, or for none ? Be it as it may, through the medium of this rper, I too was blessed ; for though on the first impulse was inclined to scorn Heyde's and to put Petersen down as an unmitigated tout, it turned out that by ais accident by a mere fluke of shiftlessness of purpose I did not go to the Hotel Napoleon, or the Hotel Coulon, or the Hotel Klee, or to the Hotel des Princes, or to Mrs. Spink's, or to the Misses Benson's, or to any of the ordinary hotels or boarding-houses where ordinary and sensible travellers usually turn up on their first arrival in Petropolis. Carrying out the apparent de- cision in the superior courts that I am never to do anything like anybody else, I managed to lose all my fellow-travellers in the yard of the temporary custom- house on the English Quay (I hasten to observe for tbe benefit of the critics who are waiting round the corner for me with big sticks, that the custom-house is at the southern extremity of Wassily-Ostrow, and that the cellars where we were searched were but a species of luggage chapel-of-ease to the greater HEYDE'S. 245 Douane). Then, going very vaguely down unto 13roschky, I fell at last among Heyde, luggage and all. A very excellent find ; a nugget of treasure trove it was to me; for I declare 'that with the exception of the fortress of Cronstadt (the congeries of forts, yards, work-shops, guard-ships, and gun-boats, I mean), which is one eye-blinding instance of apple-pie order and new-pin cleanliness, the Hotel Heyde is the only perfectly clean place bar none : nor palaces, nor churches, nor princess's chalets in the Islands with which, in the Russian Empire, this traveller is ac- quainted. The Hotel Heyde smelt certainly of soap and soup; but both were nice smells and not too powerful. It was reported that one bug had been bold enough" to cross the Neva from the Winter Palace to Heyde's some years previously ; but, whether he was paddled across the river in a gondola, or driven across the Novi-Most, or New Bridge in a droschky, was never known. He came to Heyde's, but broke his heart the first night in a miserable attempt to make an impression on the skin of the traveller for a German toy-merchant, just arrived from the fair of Nishi-Novgorod (where there are bugs that bite like sharks, who have been under articles to crocodiles). A housemaid nosed him in the lobby next morning ; but he saved himself from the disgrace of public .squashing by suicide, and they show his skin in the bar to this day. To be a little serious, Heyde's was from top to bottom scrupulously and delightfully clean. I have no interest in proclaiming its merits to the world. I have paid my bill. I am never going there again. I don't know Heyde I mean Zachara'i personally; for it was with Barnaby Brothers, his representatives, that I always transacted business. Still I can con- scientiously recommend to all future purposing Russian travellers, the Hotel Heyde, as being clean and 246 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. comfortable. It is dear, and noisy, and out of the way ; but that is neither here nor there. If I had a few of Heyde's cards with me, I would distribute them as shamelessly as any hotel tout on Calais Pier ; and my opinion of Petersen now is, that he is not merely a wide-mouthed and carnivorous wolf-cub, in a beaver porringer like the city sword-bearer, who goes about the world seeking eleemosynary beefsteaks and trim- mings but that he is a philanthropist, who, disgusted at the narrow mindedness and heart-sterility of the company that used to go to Helsingfors, has proposed to himself as a mission the perpetual pyroscaphal par- currence of the Neva from Petersburg to Cronstadt and back again, and the ceaseless distribution of unclean scraps of paper telling in Teuton and in Sclavonic of Heyde's, and young Mr. Trobbener, and himself, simply because he is a philanthropist, and that Heyde's is clean, and he, Petersen, has stayed there, and knows it. I came to Heyde's though but one man in two droschkies, like that strange animal one of which came over in two ships. In this wise. I don't mean to imply, literally, that I had one droschky for my body, and another for my legs, d la Americaine ; though I was quite fatigued enough to have rendered that means of conveyance, had it been in accordance with the pro- prieties of Petersburg, or even with possibility, de- lightful. But this was not to be. My having two- droschkies was necessitated by there being none but the little Moscow side-saddles on wheels disengaged, which hold indeed two passengers ; but, in the way of bench with the little wild beast with the long mane and tail in it, and the large wild man in the caftan, the beard, and the boots, bestriding where the splashboard ought to have been, but wasn't I have not the slightest HEYDE'S. 247 idea. However, with a bump, some jolts, and some screams, my luggage was heaped on one droschky, and I on another ; then everybody had some copecks given them including an official in Hessian boots who sud- denly appeared from a back door in the yard (I really conjectured it to be the dust-hole) who demanded seventy-five, in French, haughtily, who received them very unthankfully, and who, saying something to another official, dressed in grey (he had five copecks), which I suppose was Open Sesame ! disappeared majestically into the dust-hole again. Open Sesame ! let us out into a dusty street ; for I and the droschky- drivers and the travellers had all been prisoned within the custom-house's moated grange till this, and it had pleased the man in the dust-hole to let us out. The phaeton droschkies, the double-bodied drosch- kies, the caleche droschkies, had all driven away hotel- wards through the dust I did hope that Miss Wapps might be well bitten that same night ; and I was alone with the droschkies, the dust, and the Petersen's bit of paper. There was dust on either side, and dust beneath, and dust behind us, and dust before, and nothing more, save the occasional vision of the luggage- droschky a-head, which was bumping up and down and in and out of the pulverous cloud in a most extra- ordinary manner. I now first became acquainted with the fact, that as soon as a Russian Ischvostchik gets on a tolerably long road- way, he gives his horse his head, and throwing up his own legs, yells with delight, and is till he is compelled to heave-to by the menacing halberd of a Boutotsnik supremely happy. We were in the Perspective of something or other the Dusty- Bobboff Perspective I was inclined to call it at the time and the driver, anticipating with joy a quiet mile or so of furious driving, suddenly gave the vicious little brute he was driving his head, following it with the usual performances of leg-elevating, arm-flourish- 248 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. ing, and yelling. I decidedly thought that Ischvostchik had gone mad. The horse being given his head, took in addition his four shoes, his hocks, his tail, and everything that was his, and made good use of them, scrambling, tearing, pawing along, and I almost was led to think yelling as well as his maniacal driver. What was I to do ? What could I do, but catch hold of the Ischvostchik, at last, quite frantically by the shoulders, and entreat him to stop. For a wonder, he understood me, as I thought intuitively ; but, as I afterwards found, from my hurried Stop ! stop ! being very like to the short, sharp Russian Sto'i ! sto'i ! I have heard gentlemen who ride to hounds talk of the remarkably fine burst they have had after that carrion with the bushy tail some November morning. I have read the terribly grotesque epic of Miss Kiel- inansegge and her golden leg ; Burger has told me in Lenore how fast the dead ride ; I have seen some Derbies, Oaks, and Doncasters ; I have travelled by some [express trains ; I have seen Mr. Turner's picture of Hail, rain, steam, and speed ; and now, if for hail you will substitute dust, and for rain hot wind, and for steam a wild horse, and increase the speed as many times tenfold as you like, you will have a picture of me in the droschky, and the droschky itself flying through the dusty Perspectives of Petersburg. Over a bridge I know, where there was a shrine- chapel, 'open at the four sides, where people were worshipping. Then dust. Then along a quay. More dust. And then the seemingly interminable flight along Perspectives. And at last, Heyde's. A buildkig, apparently about a third of the size of the Bank of England, with the Corinthian pilasters beaten flat, with a hugeous blue signboard somewhat akin to that dear old Barclay and Perkins one in the England I may never see again ; on this signboard Heyde's with some of the unknown tongue beneath. HEYDE'S. 249 Beyond, over the way, and some miles on either side, houses considerably bigger than Heyde's, all painted either in white or more glaring yellow, and with some red but more green roofs.* And, save our party, not a living soul to be seen. A defection of one took place immediately from our band, small as it was, the luggage Ischvostchik feeling, no doubt, athirst how thirsty was I ! incontinently diving down some stone steps into a semi-cellar that yawned beneath Heyde's parlour windows. Such half-cellars not level with the pavement, and not an honest area depth beneath it are common in the grandest streets of Petropolis. The meanest little shops crawl at the feet of gigantic build- ings, like Lazarus lying in his rags before Dives' door. The cellar in which my Ischvostchik had disappeared was, I was not slow in concluding, a Vodki shop : first, from the strong spirituous odour which exuded there- from ; next, from the unmistakeable sign of a bunch of grapes rudely carved in wood, and profusely gilt, suspended over the doorway. And have I not a right to call this a remarkable people, who keep grog-shops, and sell meat-pies, in the basement of their palaces ? I was about to collar the second Ischvostchik to prevent his fleeing too ; but he, good fellow, wished to see me comfortably into Heyde's, or was, perhaps, anxious about the fare, and he remained. He was so anxious about this fare that he demanded it at once with pas- sionate entreaties and gesticulations, crying out, when * Comparison, even with the diminution of a third, to the vast- ness of the Bank of England is of course a little extravagant ; but I wished to give the reader a notion, there and then, of the astonishing size of even private houses in St. Petersburg. The great imperial rule is carried out even in architecture as in govern- ment. Aut Ccesar, aut loan Ivanavitch, who is considerably less than a nullity. In Russian houses there are but two classes hovels and palaces. I know one lodging-house in St. Peters- burg, close to the Moscow Railway Terminus, which has more than two thousand inmates. 250 A JOURXEY DUE KOETH. I gave him to understand by signs that he would be paid when I was inside, ' Nietts Geyde ! Nietts Geyde ! Sitchas !' Why should he have objected to be paid by Heyde, or at Heydes, or Geydes, as he called it ? Wearied at last with manual language, I asked him how much he and his brother Jehu thought themselves entitled to ; whereupon he held up such a hand the hand in a baronet's scutcheon was nothing to it for bigness, boldness, and beefiness and cried out, ' Rou- bliy cerebram ! Roubliy cerebram !' counting one, two, three fingers ; from which I gathered that he wanted three roubles nine and sixpence for a twenty mi- nutes' drive. But I did not pay him ; for, with the exception of one English sixpence, one Irish harp half- penny, one Danish Rigsbank schilling, and some very small deer in the way of copecks and silbergroschen, I had no money. I have been keeping the reader a most unconscion- able time at Heyde's Hotel door ; but I am certain that I was kept there a most unconscionable time my- self. The Ischvostchik who didn't go to the Vodki shop, and who had so great an objection to being paid by Geyde, hung himself that is about the word not for suicidal but for tintinnabulatory purposes, to a great bell that projected from the door-jamb like a gibbet, or a wholesale grocer's crane. He swung about, tugging at this bell till I could hear it booming through the house like a Chinese gong, but nobody answered it. There was a great balcony on the first floor, with a Marquise verandah above it, and in this balcony a very stout gentleman smoking a cigarette. I shouted out an inquiry to him in French and German, as to whether there was anybody in the house, but he merely smiled, wagged his fat head, and didn't answer me. He was either very deaf or very rude. Nobody came, while be- fore me glared the great closed door of Heyde's, which was painted a rich maroon colour, and had a HEYDE'S. 251 couple of great knob bell-handles, like the trunnions of brass cannon. Nobody came. It was now nearly six o'clock, but the sun was blazing away with noontide vigour, and seemingly caring no more than my friend Captain Smith for any curfews that might toll the knell of parting day. And the infernal dust, with no visible motive influence, came trooping down the street in roll- ing caravans of brown, hot, stifling clouds. And the Ischvostchik kept swinging at the demoniac bell, which kept booming, and nobody came ; and I began to think of crying aloud, this is not Petropolis or Petersburg of Russia, but the city of Dis, and Francesca of Rimini passed by in that last cloud caravan, and yonder bell- swinger is not an Ischvostchik, but P. Virgilius Maro, inducting me, Dante Alighieri, into the mysteries of the Inferno. Would that I had Dante's stool to sit upon to say nothing of the genius of that Florentine I A bearded party in a red shirt (his beard was red too) eventually put in an appearance through the tardy opening of the maroon-coloured door. He exchanged a few compliments or abusive epithets they may have been one, they may have been the other with the Isch- vostchik, then closing the door again, he disappeared and left me to desolation. How long we might have continued dwellers at the threshold at Heyde's inhospitable door is exceedingly uncertain perhaps till the cows came home, perhaps till I went mad but, just as I began to speculate on one or other of those eventualities, it suddenly occurred to my Ischvostchik to call out in a tone of triumph^ ' Geyde na Dom/ which I conjectured to be a sort of Muscovite paean for Heyde being to the fore. And, following out the discovery he had announced with such Eureka-like elocution, the droschky-driver did no more nor less than turn one of the brass-cannon-trun- nion-like door-handles and walk me into Heyde's hall. It was the old story of Mahomet and the Mountain. "252 A JOURXEY DUE NORTH. Heyde would not come to us, so we were obliged to go to Heyde which, by the way, we might perhaps have done a quarter of an hour previously. But I never was the right man in the right place yet, nor did the right thing. The second or luggage Ischvostchik he who had been so prompt in disappearing into the vodki- shop, and who had now returned smelling very strongly of that abominable black sheep of the not-at-any-time- over-reputable Alcohol family evidently thought very little of my strength of purpose in obtaining admittance into an hotel. He, with a contemptuous leer on his face, (which, round and flat, and straightly touched for line and feature, was not unlike the mystic dial that -crowns the more mystic columns in the inner sheet of the Times newspaper), seemed to taunt me with my inability to get into Heyde's ; to imply, moreover, that he knew well enough how to eifect an entrance, because he hated me as an Anglisky, and hated the other Isch- vostchik, his brother, for being his brother, simply. The sun had been brightly glaring outside ; the hall of Heyde's was painted above and on either side a cool green ; and the transition from the brazen desert outside to these leafy shades was pleasant as unexpected. It would have been much pleasanter, though, had we found any one living soul to welcome us ; but nobody came. At the extremity of the hall there commenced a very dark stone staircase, beneath which there was a recess, most uncomfortably like a grave, with a bed in it. My *eyes had been very much tried by the glare without and the green within, and my knowledge of external objects was blurred, not to say rendered null and void, by sundry elaborate geometrical patterns of fantastical design and parti-coloured hue swimming about in the verdant darkness. So I was not able to aver with any degree of distinctness whether there were anybody or jaot on the bed in the recess that looked like a grave. HEYDE'S. 253 ' Not so with the Ischvostchik ; he with cat-like agility dived into the recess, and, after many struggles, brought into the greenness the man with the red shirt who had whilom opened the front door, and shut it again in our faces. Him he shook and objurgated in much violent Russ ; at last he seemed to make the red-shirted door- shutter comprehend for what reason a very tired tra- veller should arrive in an hotel in St. Petersburg in two droschkies himself in one, his luggage in another. He cried out ' Portier, portier !' and darting down a dark corridor, presently returned with a little old man, in faded European costume very snuffy, stupid ,. semi-idiotic, as it seemed to me. I could not at all make out to what nation, if any, he had in the origin belonged ; but I managed to hammer a few words of German into him, to the effect that I was very tiredi and dusty and hungry, and that I required a bed, food, a bath, and the payment of the droschky. I don't think he clearly understood a tithe of my discourse,. but on the retina of his mind there gradually, I imagine, became impressed the image of a traveller who wanted to spend his money at Heyde's, and ultimately fee him, the porter, with silver roubles- So he rang a HAND -BELL, which brought down one of the brothers Barnabay who manage Heyde's for Za- charai the Mythic ; and this brother Barnabay (it was the stout brother) understood me, the droschkies, the difficulty, everything. Would I, dear lord as I was 7 show him my passport? This was before Barnabay quite understood anything. I showed him my passport. He was so delighted with it as to keep it, buttoning it up in a stout coat-pocket, but assuring me that it was Ganz recht ganz recht ! and immediately became as fond of me as though he had known me from infancy,. or as though I had been his other brother, and a Barna- bay. He had my rugs, my courier's bag, my spare caps and writing-case off my arms and shoulders in- 254 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. stantaneously. That famous hand-bell was tinkled again, and two more red-shirted slaves of the bell appearing, a room was ordered to be prepared and a bath to be heated for me. 1 had scarcely opened my mouth to tell him that I had no more Russian money, and that he must pay the droschky, when he had paid both. And now % on my part, understood why the Ischvostchiks had wished me to pay them, and had cried, 4 Nietts Geyde ! Nietts Geyde !' for, from their pitching my luggage viciously into the hall, from their pouring out a strain of half-whining, half-threatening remonstrances, and from Barnabay being evidently on the point, at one stage of the proceedings, to apply the punishment, not of the stick, but of the square-toed boot upon them, it is anything but doubtful that G-eyde (represented by Zacharai's representative Barnabay brother) was hard upon the Ischvostchiks, and gave them no more perhaps a little less than their fare. I am of opinion, too, that Geyde's or Heyde's was a little hard upon me, too, subsequently, in the bill rela- tive to that same cab fare ; but surely somebody must be cheated (as a Russian shopkeeper once naively remarked to me), and who so fit to be cheated as an Inostranez a stranger and, what is much worse, an Anglisky ? Leaving the Ischvostchiks to lament, or curse, or pray for us in the hall (I don't know which it was, but they made a terrible noise over it), the nimble Barnabay skips before me up the great stone staircase, which grows much lighter as we ascend, and which I begin to notice now (being somewhat recovered from the glare and the greenness), is of thatf, new-pin like degree of cleanliness I have before hinted at. Then we push aside a glass door, and enter a vast chamber, half- American bar, half-Parisian cafe in appearance ; for, at a long counter customers are liquoring, or painting or drinking drams, tell the unslanged truth 5 and HEYDES. 2o5 at little marble tables, customers are smoking and drinking demi-tasses : but wholly Russia, for all that ; for I can see, towering through the tobacco-clouds, a giant stove, all carvings and sculpture, like Sir Cloudesley Shovell's monument in Westminster Abbey. Then another glass -door ; then another corridor ; then the door of apartment Number Eighteen ; then another hand-bell is tinkled, and a real Russian chamber-maid appears to open the bed-room door, and a real German waiter for there is no promotion from the ranks at Heyde's ; and the red-chemised slaves of the bell are kept in their proper places asks me, in first-rate North German, what I will have for dinner. The first sight of apartment Number Eighteen startles me, and I confess not very favourably. If that little recess beneath the staircase, on the baseftient were like a grave ; Number Eighteen is horribly like a family vault. It is of tremendous size very dark and the bed, which is covered with snowy white drapery, is very long, narrow, uncurtained, and a very short distance removed from the floor; and has the closest and most unpleasant family resemblance to the tomb of a Knight Templar. If, in addition to this, I write that this long white bed is all alone, by itself, in the middle of the vault I mean the bed-chamber that the inevitable stove seems even higher, bigger, and whiter than Sir Cloudesley Shovell's monument in the cafe ; that the chest of drawers is dreadfully like a brick sarcophagus ; that there are some massive, gloomy shelves, on which there are no coffins as yet, but which I fancy must have been designed to receive those last of snuff-boxes, which are to titillate the nose of humanity ; that the windows, though very numerous, are very small ; that the folding-doors of a great ma- hogany wardrobe yawn tombfully, as though they were the portals of the inner chamber of death ; that there is one corner cupboard which I can almost make oath and 256 A JOURNEY DUE NOKTH. swear, is the identical corner cupboard reserved by the especial NEMESIS for years the corner cupboard where the skeleton is when I have given this hurried inventory of the furniture of Number Eighteen, it is a work of supererogation to relate that, being a nervous man, I shake my head when Barnabay Brother tells me the terms two roubles a day, exclusive of attendance and that I ask mildly whether I cannot have a smaller, lighter, cheaper apartment. But I cannot have anything smaller, cheaper, lighter, Zimmer. All else is full, engaged up to the eyes, three deep, till to-morrow fortnight, till the Greek calends. I can go over to the Napoleon, to the Coulon, to the Deymouth, to the Klee, to the Princes, but I shall find everything (not that this poor house, dear lord, would wish to lose your distinguished, and, of consideration, patron- age !) as full as the tomb of the Eleven Thousand Virgins at Cologne. This l funerals-performed ' allu- sion jars upon my nerves again, as having unpleasant reference to the family- vault view of things in general.. But, as I find I can't well obtain any other accommo- dation ; as I opine I can turn out and engage cheaper apartments in a private house to-morrow ; as the vaulty though a vault, looks a remarkably clean mausoleum, and does not by any means give me the impression, that it is haunted even by the ghost of a flea, such, as poor dear William Blake, the supernaturalist painter, saw what time he witnessed a fairy's funeral in a garden, by moonlight I accede to the terms, and am swiftly at home at Heyde's. I say at home and swiftly ; because no sooner have I accepted to sit at Heyde's, at fourteen silver roubles- a week, than I become in Barnabay's mind, no longer a wandering traveller, higgling and haggling for ac- commodation but ' Nuramer achtsehn,' Number Eighteen, duly housed and recognised ; my passport in Heyde's pocket (you will observe that I use the terms HEYDE'S. 257 Heyde's, Barnabay, Zacharai, somewhat indifferently ; -but is it not all one with regard to nomenclature, when all is Heyde's ?) my name on Heyde's house-slate, my name, in far more enduring characters already, in Heyde's ledger : for, has he not paid the Ischvostchiks, and is not that the commencement of a goodly score ? At home at Heyde's, I have to repeat ; for perhaps, while the Brother Barnabay is chalking me up as Number Eighteen, one red-shirted slave of the bell has devoided me of almost every particle of apparel, and has, by some astonishing feat of gymnastic ability, got on to some adjacent housetop, where I can see him, and hear him brushing them, and hissing meanwhile in approval, ostler fashion. Another vassal is preparing -an adjacent bath-room, which (always remember that we are in a German hotel) is on the ordinary hot-water principle, and not the stewpan, combined with chemical distillery, finished off by Busbeian discipline and Jmckets-of-cold-water, Russian vapour-bath. Serf num- ber three, the twin brother of the two others, has uncorded my luggage, and is now tugging away at my boots, with so good-humoured a grin on his willing bearded countenance that I am far more inclined to slap him on the shoulder than to remember that my feet are swollen, and that he has nearly dislocated my ankle. You find among the poor slave Russians I can scarcely say the poorest, lowest, most degraded, when all are degraded, and low, and poor : all figures of Zero, to swell the millions of roubles their masters possess, and make those Units wealthy and powerful the kindest faces, the most willing, obliging, grateful dispositions in the world. To qualify that old Billingsgate locution, which, coarse as it is, is exactly applicable here, ' Barring that a Russian moujik is a liar and a thief, no one can say that black is the white of his eye.' He is kind ; he is grateful ; he is affectionate ; not quarrelsome when drunk ; untiringly industrious (when on his own account, 258 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. he will idle the lord's time away, and who can wonder ?); ordinarily frugal ; and as astonishingly self-denying a& an Irish peasant when he has a purpose to serve. His vices are the vices of barbarism ; and here comes the difficulty in his treatment to those who are even most disposed to treat him kindly. I declare of my own knowledge that it is impossible to live in Russia, among the Russians, without feeling that the serfs from do^ mestic servants to farm labourers, from ladies' waiting- maids to village babas laugh at what we should call kindness, and despise a master who does not act on the principle of a word and a blow. It is impossible to avoid becoming to a certain degree hardened and brutalized by the constant spectacle of unrestrained tyranny on the one hand, and by the impossibility of resistance on the other. Every one beats, and kicks, and cuffs, and calls his inferiors by opprobrious epithets : would it be surprising that, through mere habit, the most ardent lover of freedom fell into some of the despotic ways of those he lived amongst ? I am glad to say that I lived too short a time in the Russian Rome for it to be seldom if ever necessary to me to do as the Romans do ; yet I have often been conscious and ashamed of a temptation to administer the argument of Mr. Grantley Berkeley the punch on the head for what would in England have been considered, if an offence at all, one only to be visited by a word of re- proof; I have often been conscious, and more ashamed, of speaking to droschky-drivers, and waiters, and Ivan generally, in a manner that, employed towards a cabby or a coal ly in England would have infallibly brought on the punching of my head, if not the knocking down of my body altogether. Of Heyde's more anon ; whether the family vault bed-room did or did not contain ghosts, and who the fat man was who was smoking the cigarette in the balcony, and answered not when I spoke to him. ( 259 ) XIV. MY BED AND BOARD. A GREAT writer has somewhere told a story of a man about town Crockey Doyle was, I think, his name- who became very popular in society through the talent he possessed for making apologies. He would give offence purposely, and be in the wrong advisedly, in order to be able to make, afterwards, the most charm- ing retractations in the world. No one could be long angry with a man who apologised so gracefully ; so he became popular accordingly, was asked out to dinner frequently ; and was eventually, I dare say, popped into a snug berth in the Tare and Tret Office. I have not the easy eloquence of Crockey Doyle. I am not popular. My most frequent Amphytrions are Humphrey, Duke of Grlo'ster, or the head of the great oriental house of Barmecide and Company. And no one, I am sure, would ever dream of giving me a place. Yet I am for ever making apologies. Like the gambler's servant, who was ' always tying his shoe ;' like Wych Street, which is always vehicle-obstructed ; like a friend of mine, who, whenever I meet him, is always going to his tea, and never, seemingly, accomplishes that repast ; I am always apologising either for the things I have done, or for the things I ought to and have not done. I have apologised in England, and in France, and in Germany ; here I am again, a self-accusing clown apologising in St. Petersburg of Russia ; and I have little doubt that if I live I shall be apologising in Pekin, or New Orleans, or the Island of Key West. My apologies in the present instance are due to my readers, firstly, for having loitered and lingered outside the door of Heyde's, and for having described everything concerning that hotel save the hotel itself. Secondly, for having placed the words Hand-Bell in capital letters, without offering the slightest explanation as to why that s 2 260 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. diminutive tintinnabulum should be so suddenly pro- moted in the typographical scale. Touching the first, though you might have put me down merely as a bore telling you of things that did not interest you, or desirous of spinning a lengthened yarn out of one poor thread or as a simpleton, nervous and ashamed, who lingers long in the vestibule of a mansion in which there is a feast prepared, and he invited thereto, and takes his goloshes off and on, instead of going upstairs boldly, and making his bow to the hostess : though this may have been your conviction, I had, in truth, a deep-laid and subtle design to impress you with a notion of what an opposite a Russian is to an English or a continental hotel, and how fundamentally oriental are the habits and manners of the people I am cast among. The Russian hotel is, in fact, nothing more than a Smyrniote or Damascene caravanserai vast, lonely, unclean, thickly peopled, yet apparently de- serted, the same caravanserai, into whose roomy court- yard you bring your camels, your asses, and your bales of silks, and drugs, and pipes, and Persian carpets ; in whose upper chambers you may have equivalents for pilaff and rice, may go to bed afterwards armed, for fear of thieves, and for want of them fight with vermin. Heyde's tell it to all nations is clean ; and Heyde's, internally, is German ; but its exterior arrangements have been Russianised against the Heydian will ; and its inferior valetaille are all Muscovite : hence the dif- ficulty of entrance ; hence the listlessness of the outer domestics ; hence the necessity of the HAND-BELL I am about to apologise for presently, and which is nothing more than a substitute for the hand-clapping which, in the East, brings the cafegi with the coffee and chibouks, and in the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, the forty thousand black slaves with the jars of jewels on their heads. In the worst town's vrorst inn, I will not say closest MY BED AND BOARD. 261 to the mere territorial Russian frontier, but in German Russia say in Riga or Mittau there is, instantly on the arrival of the modestest bachelor traveller, with the corapactest of valises, a tremendous hurry-scurrying to and fro of porters, boots, (hausknechts, the Germans call them,) chambermaids, waiters, and even landlords. The carillon of a great bell summons all these hotel myrmidons from the vasty deep of the billiard-room and the corridors as soon as your cab-wheels are heard in the courtyard. The landlord advances with the stereotyped grin, and the traditional hand-rubbing pe- culiar but common to all hotel landlords, from mine host of the Garter in England to mine host of the Hotel de Londres at Riga. The hausknecht shoulders your luggage, and disappears with it before you say whether you mean to stop at the hotel or not ; the portier (pro- nounced porteer : tremendous men are German porteers Titans with gold aiguillettes on their shoulders, and selling on their own private account cigars the choicest, for those who like them) the portier pays your cab, asks your name, and says there are no letters for you as yet (he has never seen you before in his life), but he rather thinks there will be, next post. The waiter, or waiters, skimmer about undecidedly, but ready for everything, from an order for champagne to an order for a sheet of letter-paper ; the chambermaid imme- diately converts herself into a Mont Blanc of towels, and a hot spring of Iceland, in the way of cans of boiling water ; the very white-vested and night-capped cook peeps through the grated window of his kitchen a prisoner in no respect connected with Chillon and beams on you a greasy ray of assurance, that though your dinner may be dear and dirty, it shall be hot and oleaginous. Finally, the landlord, with the grin and the rubbed hands, conducts you in a mincing canter up many staircases and through many corridors ; and you are unpassported, unbooted, undressed, and in 262 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. bed, in about the same manner I have described in the last chapter. Now, all of this takes place inside Heyde's, but not one atom on the exterior thereof. You may come in a droschky, or one of the naming Nevsko'i om- nibuses licensed to carry other passengers besides human ones or in a hearse, or in the Lord Mayor's coach, supposing the transportation of that vehicle to be possible ; but not the slightest attention will be paid to you, till you get in. You might as well be that Mr. Ferguson who was told, that although other matters might be arranged on an amicable footing, he could not lodge there (wherever ' there ' was), on any considera- tion. Inside Heyde's there is pleasant gnashing of teeth over a good German dinner; outside Heyde's there is wailing at the apparent impossibility of getting any dinner at all. But I am inside Heyde's now, and have my bed and board there. I stay at Heyde's a month, and mark its ways, and note them with the informer's pen. To have done with the apologies, I hope I have explained that outer delay on the Heydian frontier satisfactorily : to have done with the hand-bell let me tell you that unless you have your own servant with you (and to have a servant I should counsel every traveller in Russia who possesses the means ; and if he possess them not, what the deuce is the good of his travelling in Russia at all ?) you have not the slightest chance of having any attention paid to your wishes as regards refreshment, or anything else unless you tinkle a hand- bell. The Russians understand wire-bells no more than they do chimes ; they must have the immediate and discordant jingle. It is no good calling ' Waiter !' ' Gargon !' * Tchelovek !' or ' Kellner !' without the bell. Tchelovek, or as the case may be, calls ' Sitchass !' (directly) but cometh not ; but, ring your hand-bell (Kolokol), and he is at your beck and call instan- taneously. He hears and obeys. He will bring you MY BED AND BOARD. 263 anything. He will stand on his head if you gratify him with copecks sufficient. Very good to me are my bed and board at Heyde's. Cheerful when I wish it Lonely when I so desire it. Let us have the lonely object first. I have bought at an Italian artists' colourman's on the Nevskoi, un pinceau de Rafaelle& box of water- colours, Newman, Soho Square; how strange the Prince of Wales's plumes and ' Ich dien ' on the cakes look here, in Muscovy ! at a price for which I could have purchased a handsome dressing-case and fittings, in London and Paris. When I am tired of the noise and turmoil of the buffet (for I am alone in Russia, as yet, and have very few acquaintances and no friends) I retire into the family vault, and make sketches of the strange things and people I have seen in the streets. They are very much in the penny-valentine manner of art pre-Adamite, rather than pre-Rafaellite. Then I make manuscript transcripts of matters Russian that have been written on the tables of my memory during the day, on infinitesimal scraps of paper in a hand- writing whose minuteness causes me not to despair of being able to earn my living some day by writing the decalogue within the circumference of a shilling. These, being desperately afraid perhaps needlessly . of spies and duplicate-key possessors, I hide furtively in the lining of my hat, wondering whether as usually happens to me I shall manage to lose my hat in some steamboat-cabin or railway-carriage before I land in England, and be compelled to purchase in Dover or Brighton (I will except Southampton, whose hats are excellent) the hardest, heaviest, shiniest of English country-made Paris velvet-naps. My last hat was a Dover one, and impressed such a bright crimson fillet the incineration of sundry papiros or cigarettes, I be* came strangely enlightened as to what an expensiva luxury being robbed is in Russia.. If ever you journey for your sins, my dear friend; Due North, and happen to have anything stolen -from you be that anything your watch, your fur pelisse, or- your pocketbook full of bank notes never apply to the- police. Grin and bear it. Put up with the loss*. Keep it dark. Buy new articles to replace the old ones you have lost ; but, never complain. Complaints will lead to your being replundered fourfold. They will end in your being hunted like a fox, and torn up- at last piecemeal by the great foxhunter Bogey and his hounds. I will put a case : I have a handsome gold watcb (which I haven't), and I am in St. Petersburg (where I am not). I go for an evening's amusement to the Eaux Minerales, where the chalybeate springs are the pretext, and Herr Isler's gardens, with their military bands and fireworks and suspicious company, the real attraction. My watch is quietly subtracted from my fob by some dexterous pickpocket in the gardens ; and I deserve no sympathy for my mishap, for Isler's is famous for its filous. The next day I goT like a fool, and according to my folly, and lodge my complaint at the police Siege of my arrondissement. I have the number of my watch. I give the maker's name. I describe it minutely, and narrate accurately the cir- THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOGEY (THE POLICE). 309 /eumstances under which it was taken from me. I do not see the major of police, but one of his aids. The aid tells me in German (the judicial police, as a rule, do not speak French ; the secret police speak every language under the sun Chinese, I am sure, included) .that justice is on the alert, that the thief will certainly be caught and brought to condign punishment, and that of the ultimate recovery of my watch there cannot be any reasonable doubt. Clerks have got through a prodigious quantity of manuscript all about me and my watch, by this time ; and a number of the everlasting forms are pushed towards me to sign. I have been told beforehand what I must do, and that there is no help for it, so I slip a red note for ten roubles, en sandwich, between two of the forms, and hand the triplet to the aid, who with a greasy smile bids me good morning. Henceforth I belong no more to myself, but to Eogey. I am hunted up in the morning while I am shaving, and at night as I am retiring to rest. I am peremptorily summoned to the police office five minutes before dinner, and five minutes before I have concluded that repast. With infernal ingenuity Bogey fixes on the exact hours when I have a social engagement abroad, to summon me to his cave of Trophonius, and submit me to vexatious interrogatories. Bogey catches -sham thieves for me worsted stocking knaves with liearts in their bellies no bigger than pins' heads mere toasts and butter, who would as lieye steal the Czar's crown as a gold watch, and whose boldest feat of larceny would probably be the purloining of a picklea -cucumber from a stall. I am confronted with these .scurvy companions, and asked whether I can identify them. Bogey's outlying myrmidons bring me vile pinchbeck saucepan lids, infamous tinpot sconces, which they call watches ; and would much like to know if I can recognise them as my property. All this time I .am paying rouble after rouble for perquisitions, and 310 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. inquiries, and gratifications, and messengers' expenses,, and stamps, and an infinity of ' other engines of ex- tortion. At last (under advice) I rush to the major of police, and ask him plainly (but privately), for how much he will let me off. He [smiles and refers me to his aid, saying that justice cannot have her course impeded. I go to the aid, and he smiles too,|and tells me that he- does not think the disbursement of twenty roubles will do my Excellency any harm ; and 'that if I choose to- place that sum in his hand to be administered in charity,, he thinks he can guarantee my not being again troubled about the robbery. So, I give him the money (which I don't), and, thank Heaven, I am rid of Bogey, as Andrew Miller thanked Heaven he was rid of Doctor Johnson. Now do you understand why every sensible man in Russia, who is unfortunate enough to be robbed, leaves Bogey alone? It would be easy to multiply instances illustrative of the taking propensities of the Russian police, among whom, in St. Petersburg and Moscow as well as in other government towns of the empire there is really not one pin to choose. Bogeyism is synonymous with police management throughout all the Russias. I shall confine myself to one or two salient traits of character to be found in those terrifiers of well-doers who ought to terrify evil-doers, but who are the worthy successors, and have in Muscovy continued the glorious traditions of that most illustrious of all takers Jonathan Wild the Great. The Sieur de Brantome generally commences his chivalrous tittle-tattle with the exordium : Une grande dame, forte honeste, que fay bien cocjnu (a great lady, and a mighty honest one, whom 1 know extremely well) ; and I find myself as constantly giving an anecdote on the authority of some Russian acquaintance far nobler than honest. In this present instance, however, THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOGEY (THE POLICE). 311 my informant was a French hairdresser and perfumer, who had settled at Moscow, with the stern and inflexible determination to stay there five years, acquire a fortune of fifty thousand francs, and then quitting that beastly hole (by which " abusive epithet he qualified the holy empire of Russia), to return to Arcis-sur-Aube ; which much white-washed French town was his native place, and there to planter ses chouz, or cabbages, defeat the cure* of St. Symphorien at his favourite game of tric- trac ; become, in course of time, mayor of some adjacent village, and eventually, perhaps, re-assume his ancestral title of Monsieur de la Bandoline (now lying perdu, like the Spanish Hidalgo's rapier, under the modest nom de circonstance of Hayacinthe, coiffeur et peruquier de Paris), and become sub -prefect of his department. A friend of M. Hyacinthe's sayM. Melasse like- wise a sprightly Gaul, kept a magazine for the sale of those articles called by the Americans, * notions,' in the Tverskaia Oulitza, or great street of Tver, in Moscow. But here I must digress with a word or two on shops : it is only in old-world cities, where the civilisation is old very old that you find actual shops special establishments for the sale of special articles. As in the rude and remote country village, you have Jerry Nutt's Everything Shop, where you can procure almost every article from a birch-broom to a Byron-tie, from a stick of barley-sugar to a lady's chemisette ; so, in newly-settled \ or newly-civilised lands you have not shops but Stores, where edibles are mixed up with potables, and textile fabrics with both, and books with beeswax, and carpeting with candles. Our American cousins have repudiated the Everything element, and have Shops that can vie with, if they do not surpass the counter-jumping palaces of Regent Street, London, and the Rue de la Paix, Paris. Yet they still retain the name of a Store, for an establishment, say a shawl- shop, more magnificent than Swan and Edgar's, corus- 312 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. eating with glass and gilding, and mural paintings, and variegated marbles ; and the Russians, for all the big- ness of their cities, have not yet, as a rule, progressed beyond stores in their streets. In the bazaars there are, certainly, special standings for special articles ; but, these are more properly stalls than shops. In the two great shops of St. Petersburg the Angliski Magazin, in the little Millionne, and the Ruski-Magazin, on the Nevsko'i the incongruous nature of the articles sold is astonishing, and, in the smaller "shops, there is a distracting confusion in the classification of the articles purchased. The hairdressers sell almost everything. You have to go to the grocers for picture-frames. The tobacconists sell tea ; the glove-makers sell porte- monnaies. The best cigars to be had in Petersburg are purchased at an apotheka or druggist's shop, in the Little Morskaia (the druggists sell camera-obscuras, too). You may buy French painted fans at the con- fectioners, and there is scarcely a fashionable modiste who does not sell flesh and blood. Altogether, our respected friend Mother Hubbard would have enormous trouble in Russia in attempting to purvey for that insatiable dog of hers, who (like a minister s mother- in-law) was always wanting something. She would have had to go to the bishop's to buy him ale, or to the Winter Palace to buy him a bone. M. Melasse sold groceries and a little millinery, and a considerable quantity of coloured prints, and some Bordeaux, and much Champagne. But, M. Me'lasse happened^ though doing a good business, to have a temper of his own. Why should M. Melasse's temper interfere with the success of M. Melasse's business? So far, that the black dog which occasionally sat on the worthy burgess's shoulder, could not abide that other and Blacker Dog, Bogey, the Police of Moscow, and barked at him continually. Ces C/iiens, (these dogs,) the impudent Melasse called the guardians of public THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOGEY (THE POLICE). 313 order. One afternoon two gentlemen in grey called on M. Melasse (he spoke Russ tolerably, which in a French- man is something marvellous), and saluting him cor- dially, produced from a remarkably dirty envelope of sacking two fine sugar-loaves the apex of one of them considerably damaged. These, they told him, had been found in the open street opposite his house on the previous night; were evidently the produce of a robbery committed on his premises; and were now brought to him, not to be restored, but to be identified, in order that justice might inform itself, and perqui- sitions be made respecting the thief. Now, the seller of notions happened to be entirely out of sugar in loaves, iiad broken up his last a fortnight before, was rapidly exhausting his stock of lump sugar, and was anxiously expecting a fresh consignment. He therefore energe- tically protested that the robbery could not have taken place in his house ; because, imprimis he had securely fastened doors and windows, and kept a fierce watch- dog ; secondly, because he had no sugar-loaves to be robbed of. The men in grey smiled grimly, and showed the astonished grocer his own private trade-mark on both the loaves. He could not even surmise them to be forged ; they were evidently his. The men in grey therefore proceeded to commence their perquisitions, which they effected by ransacking the house and shop from garret to basement spoiling every article of merchandise they could conveniently spoil avowedly for the purpose of seeking traces of the burglarious entrance of the thieves. Ultimately they left a man in possession, to watch, in case the robbers renewed their nefarious attempt. This assistant Bogey turned out to be a grey-coated skeleton in every closet in the house. He smoked the vilest Mahorka; he drank vodki like a vampire ; his taking snuff was as the sound of a trumpet ; he demanded victuals like a roaring lion ; he devoured them like a ghoule ; he awoke the 314 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. family in the dead of night with false alarms of fire and thieves ; he drove M. Melasse to frenzy, Madame M. to passionate indignation ; Mademoiselle M. to tears and hysterics; the younger M's. nearly into fits of terror; and he stayed a fortnight. The thieves didn't come, and he didn't go. In the mean time the wretched grocer lived the life of a hunted cur. The police put the sugar-loaves (metaphorically) into a tin kettle, and attaching them to his dorsal vertebra, hunted him perpetually. The same process of summoning, resum- moning, interrogating, and cross-interrogating, which I have already described in my own (suppositious) case, was gone through with him. The police found out that he was in the habit of going daily on .change (for the good man speculated a little in Volga Steamboat and Russ- American Ironwork shares). Of course he had to attend the police office daily, for a week, exactly at Change time, and was released by his tormentors exactly as the Exchange gates closed. The police captured two poor devils of moujiks, who, setting aside the fact that they had been previously convicted of robbery, were as honest men as the Governor of Moscow, and had no more to do with the robbery (which had never been committed) than I had. These unfortunate rogues they kept chained for some time, and living on bread and water in an infamous den at the Police Siege, averring that there was the strongest presumption of their guilt. They suddenly discovered that they were as free from blame as the driven snow ; setting them at liberty, they sent in a peremptory demand to M. Me'lasse for a corpulent sum of roubles, to defray the expenses of their board and lodging during their imprisonment, and to compensate them for the injury they had suffered. He at first refused to pay, but ultimately disbursed the sum demanded, in despair. He was beginning to entertain the notion of a plunge,, for good and all, into the Moskva river, when he re- THE GREAT RUSSIAN BOGEY (THE POLICE). 315- ceived a communication from the major of police, in- forming him in the most polite terms that it had been considered expedient to refer his case, which was con- sidered to be a very intricate one, to the Ouprava Blagotschinia, or Bureau de Bon Ordre, presided over by the Grand Master of Police in St. Petersburg, and begging him to take the necessary steps to present a petition to the Governor-General of Moscow, in order that he might procure a passport, and proceed to head police quarters at St. Petersburg, there to be interro- gated concerning the most remarkable robbery that had for a long time baffled the sagacity of justice: - the more remarkable, I may myself remark, for its- never having taken place. Melasse, the unhappy r rushed on the wings of the wind, and. the polished runners of a sledge (it was in winter) to the police office. He thrust five roubles into the first grey-coat's hand he met, and promised him ten, if he would procure him immediate speech with the Major of Police. Ushered into the presence of that functionary he conjured him,, without halting for breath, to tell him how much, in the name of Heaven, he would take to release him from this intolerable persecution. The polizei-major laughed,, poked him in the ribs, and offered him to snuff. ' I am glad to see you returning to better sentiments,, my dear M. Melasse,' he said, quite cordially. ' What is the good of fighting against us? Why omit doing what must be done ? You are in Russia, you must be content to have things managed a la Russe. When you live with wolves you must needs howl, M. Melasse/ ' How much?' the victim palpitated. * There, there, brat,' (brother) continued the warm- hearted police-major. ' You shall be absolved easily. I think if you were to place a hundred and fifty silver roubles in that blotting-book, I should know how to- relieve many destitute families. We see so MUCH misery, my dear friend,' he added with a sigh. M. Melasse set his teeth very closely together ; drew 316 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. the hundred and fifty silver roubles in paper-money from his pocket-book, shut his eyes that he might not .see his substance departing from him, and crammed ihe money into the blotting-book. ' And I tell you what, uncle of mine,' the major resumed, jauntily fluttering the blotting-book leaves, .and twirling (quite accidentally, of course) the greasy little packet of wealth into his ravenous palm, 'you .shall not say that the Russian police never return any of the goods they have recovered ; for, this very after- noon, I will send down two of rny men, and YOU SHALL HAVE YOUR SUGAR-LOAVES BACK AGAIN.' With a suppressed shriek, the emancipated-loaf cap- itive entreated the major never to let him hear or see more of that accursed sweetstuff. The major was a placable man, and open to suasion. He promised to -allow the sugar-question to drop for ever ; and dignify- ing the unroubled grocer with the affectionate cognomen of Batiouschka little father bade him an airy good morning, and retired into his sanctum sanctorum: .there, doubtless to lock up his honestly-earned roubles in his cassette, and, perhaps, to laugh somewhat in Jthat official sleeve of his, at the rare sport of swindling .a Fransoutz. The moral of the story is, that Melasse stead. Most reverend seigneurs potent and grave like- wise you have entertained at your boards, you have- sat at council with, you, most beauteous ladies, you have'waltzed and flirted with, and have had your slender waists encircled by the kid-gloved hands of, and have accepted bouquets and ices from not the sons or the grandsons of, but the very men who were guests among those bloody sixty who supped at a house in the Pour- schlatskaia Oulitza on the twenty-third of March,, eighteen hundred and one, who formed part of the band of murderers who, under the guidance of Platora ZoubofF and Pahlen and Benningsen, maddened with hatred and drunk with champagne, rushed after the orgie was over to the Winter Palace on the canal, and took the Czar, naked and a-bed, and slew him. They say that Alexander the First never recovered from the first fit of (I hope not guilty) horror into which he was thrown by the deed he profited so largely by ; that the triumphs of the Borodino and the Beresina,, the splendours of Erfurt and Tilsit, the witticisms of Madame de Stael, the patronage of the first gentleman (and we hope the last gentleman of that pattern) in Europe, including as that patronage did a Guildhall banquet, the pencil of Sir Thomas Lawrence, the 348 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. Temple of Concord on the Serpentine, and Sir William Congreve's fireworks nay, not these nor the invoca- tions of Madame Krudener, could ever efface from his mind the memory of that night of abominations. They say that on his doubtful bed of death at Taganrog he writhed with more than pain, and continually moaned : * Oil ! c'est epouvantable ! cest epouvantable /' and then, after a lapse, * I 'Empereur /' The gentlewoman was not by as in the tragedy, but the physician was ; and he knew his patient was suffering from ills that physic could not cure. The lord of sixty million souls was haunted by the remembrance of that night. He saw in imagination the bed-room ; the conspirators reeling in ; the Czar in his shirt, hiding behind a screen ; the incoherent torrent of adjurations and menaces in French and Russ ; and then the dreadful knocking at the outer door ; the fear of rescue (though, indeed, it was but another band of conspirators arriv- ing) ; the overturn of the lamp, and the end of that monarch. I say, seigneurs and ladies, you have walked and talked with some of those who supped and killed -afterwards. They are very old, white-headed men now, high in office, decorated from the nave to the ^chaps, great diplomatists, adepts in statecraft; but there was a time when they were dashing young officers in the guards, and they saw in reality that which Alexander saw only in imagination. They could tell you whether it was Platon Zouboff or Count Pahlen who smashed Paul's skull in, with the hilt of his sword ; they could tell you whether it was Pahlen or Ben- ningsen who knelt on the Czar's breast, and put him out of his misery by strangling him with an em- broidered scarf. I wonder whether the survivors of that scene ever think of the matter at all ! Whether -at congress table, or court ball, or civic banquet, in opera-box, or silk-lined carriage, or actresses' boudoir, they ever think of the overturned lamp, the sword- TCHORNI NAROD: (THE BLACK PEOPLE). 349' hilt, and the scarf. Does the Avenger of Blood pursue- them ? does Atra Cura, the black horseman, ride be- hind them ? Or do they look at the twenty-third of March, eighteen hundred and one, as a mere boyish, freak a peck of wild oats which they have sown profit- ably, and reaped abundant crops of protocols and paraphes, stars, crosses, and titles from ? Hand obliviscendum^ indeed! Life would be im- possible without a shower-bath of the waters of Lethe every quarter of a century or so ; without the sponge being applied when the slate is too full, and the tub of whitewash being brought in when the schedule has. swelled too grossly. This man, I know, forged when he was twenty rector's churchwarden now. This, stole- a goose, and was whipped for the theft, somewhere in the West Indies high up in the Wooden-Spoor* Referendaries Office now. This, robbed his father, deserted his children, broke his own wife's heart, and. ran away with another man's knighted last week.. This, was the most covetous hunks, the hardest-hearted usurer, the unjustest steward that money-bags have- been clutched by since Harpagon or Hopkins he is- dead. The Reverend Hango Head, M.A., is writing a Latin epitaph for him, and his disconsolate widow has ordered a memorial window, setting forth his- virtues (in pre-Raphaelitically painted glass) in the chancel of Saint Jonathan and Saint Gyves Great. Wilderton Church. Once again the Black People met, silently and timorously to learn that they had changed masters,, when, in eighteen hundred and twenty-six the news arrived of Alexander's death, and the cruel Constantino abdicated, and the Czar who was to do so much and. so little for good and evil, for the glory and the shame of Russia, had to seize his diadem, perforce with en- sanguined hands, and wrap a gory shroud round his. imperial purple. As before, the Black People had 350 A JOUK5EY CUE XOKTH. neither act nor part in the events of which they were frightened spectators. Constantine or Nicholas, it was not one salted cucumber, one copeck's worth of black bread, one beaker of quass, the more to them. The boyards alone were to change masters ; and they were to be the slaves of slaves for ever and ever. The real crowd was one of soldiery, who fought regiment -against regiment, some for Nicholas, some for Con- stantine ; some for a cloudy myth of a constitution and a republic their leaders had got, heaven knows how, into their muddled heads perhaps while in garrison In some German town among moon-struck illuminati in eighteen hundred and thirteen ; some for they knew not what, for a fancied millennium, perhaps, of more vodki, and the stick being broken and cast into the pit for a thousand years. They fought in the Great Admiralty Square till the crisp snow was patched with crimson pools, and the cavalry horses, dabbling in them, pimpled the expanse with their hoof-nails for hundreds of yards around. So, as all men know, General Milo- radovitch was slain ; the cannon began to thunder ; the Czar Nicholas came to his own ; Pestel and the others were hanged ; princes and counts and generals went in chains to Siberia ; and the Tchorni-Narod, having stripped the corses of the slain lying on the now russet snow on the Adrairalteskaia Ploschad, went to sell the old clothes and trinkets in the Tolkoutchji- Binok (Great Elbow Market), and then to their several avocations of droschky-driving and quass-selling, and hewing the wood, and drawing the water. There was to come a time though, when, for once in their oppressed lives, the Black People were to make a public appearance as a Mob, tumultuous, ferocious, and dangerous. The crowd of the moujiks in the Sinnaia or Haymarket of St. Petersburg, is the one historical crowd in which the people were actors and not looking on. This was in the first year of Asiatic TCHORNI NAROD: (THE BLACK PEOPLE). 351 cholera declaring itself en permanence at St. Peters- burg. It is now domiciled there en permanence, and the Tchorni-Narod are as accustomed to it as to dirt, or to vermin, or to the stick. The Government had very praiseworthily taken the best sanitary precau- tions for the prevention of, and had adopted the most accredited remedies for the cure of, this awful malady. It seemed like a stern measure of retribution meted out to the wicked rulers of an oppressed people, that where they were really endeavouring to do good the Tchorni Narod rebelled against it. They could swal- low the camel of tyranny they strained at the gnat of benevolence. The Government had sown in igno- rance ; they reaped in revolt. The great hospitals of Ouboukhoff and Kalinkine had both been placed under the superintendence of German physicians, who ex- erted themselves to the utmost to treat successfully the almost innumerable cases of cholera that were daily brought in. The average number of cholera cases in St. Peters- burg alone, in the summer last past, was, according to the Gazette de TAcademie (as reliable a Russian docu- ment as, I believe, can well be found), three hundred and ten per diem. Of the average in Moscow I have no information. The vast majority of these cases were among the Tchorni Narod, and were fatal. This can easily be understood, if we remember the diet and positively Nomad habits of the masses in Holy Russia. The Ischvostchiks frequently sleep on their droschky benches, in the open air, exposed to every fluctuation of the always fluctuating weather. The dvorniks or yardmen always sleep alfresco, wrapped in their sheep- skin touloupes or pelisses. The mechanics and labour- ers who come into St. Petersburg, for the summer months, from the outlying provinces of Carelia and Ingria, sleep also a la belle etoile, wherever the most convenient scaffolding or mortar-heap can be found ; and there are thousands of the Black People who sleep 352 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. wheresoever, and under whatever circumstances, they can. The Russians, who are so studiously looked after by the police, to the minutest shade of passports and police, are perhaps the people in Christendom who habitually, and to the greatest extent, possess the key of the street. When, in addition to this, it is borne in- mind that the Russian moujik scarcely ever tastes meat, and that his ordinary food is salted cucumber, black bread, and quass, the prevalence of cholera in St. Petersburg will be easily accounted for. The people, in their miserable ignorance of right and wrong, caught hold of an idea. This idea was no doubt industriously disseminated among them in the first instance by agents of that secret democratic- and socialist party which Siberia, the mines, Count OrlofFs cabinet and its scourgings, exile, confiscation, fortress-dungeons and espionage notwithstanding ex- isted occult, indomitable, and active as Balzac's Treize has always continued to exist in Russia from the time* of the first French Revolution. The idea was that the moujiks, their brethren, were being systematically poi- soned by the German doctors, and by express direc- tion of the Government. For once Ivan Ivanovitch forgot that the Czar was his father, his pastor and master, his guide, philosopher, and friend, and Heaven's vicegerent upon earth. An analogous report of the wells having been poisoned was, it will be remembered, current among the populace in Paris in the first year of the cholera's visitation, and several emeutes took place ; nor in England, in eighteen thirty-two, were there wanting alarmists of the Mrs. Grundy school, ta ascribe the pestilence on the one side to the machi- nations |of the disappointed boroughmongers ; on the other to the malevolence of Levellers, Radicals, and Trades-union men. Ivan forgot the power of the police and his own helplessness. He and his comrades in thousands stormed the hospitals, massacred the doc- tors and their assistants under circumstances of the TCHORNI NAROD : (THE BLACK PEOPLE.) 353 most shocking brutality, threw the beds and bedding out of the windows, carried off the patients (to die, poor wretches, in carts and cellars, and under vege- table-stalls and horse-troughs) ; and then, like a mob of schoolboys who have screwed up their courage to pelt an unpopular usher, and who afterwards with outward words of boasting and rebellion, but with an inward sinking of their hearts into their highlows, bar them- selves into the school-room, defying the masters, but knowing full well that authority will get the best of it, and that Birnam Wood will be brought to Dunsinane, for brooms to thrash them with ; the Ivan did his barring out. All cowering and wondering that he could have been so bold in the Sennaia ; entrenching himself behind trusses of hay and piles of fruit and vegetables beneath the bulks of butchers' stalls and among crates of crockery (for they sell all things in the Haymarket) ; armed with such rude instruments of defence as hatchets, and straightened scythes attached to poles, and the great three-pronged forks with which the bread is drawn from the peetch, or stove ; he awaited the coming of the troops. I have no doubt, that had the soldiery really arrived and set to work, the moujiks would have suffered the most violent cannonade and musket practice, without attempting to move until they were routed out by the bayonet. Their energy was over ; their rebellion was, thenceforth, inert and passive. But the Czar Nicholas knew too well the temperament of his children to send against them, or horse, or foot, or artillery. To cow- hide your slave : good ; but to destroy valuable property by taking your slave's life, none but a foolish slave- holder would do that. It is an old story, but worth the telling again, that Nicholas, unattended by escort, or aide-de-camp, or groom, was driven in his single droschky, with the one single Ischvostchik before him to drive him to the place of the revolt. That, arrived 2 A 354 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. on the Sennaia, he quickly alighted, and, wrapped in his grey coat, and helmed and plumed, stalked through the masses of rebellious thousands, (who made an astonished vacillating lane for him to pass,) towards the church with the four cupolas, and the dome with the silver stars, that stands in the right hand upper extremity of the Haymarket. That, ascending the marble stairs of that fane, he prostrated himself before the image of the saint that stood in the porch ; and then suddenly turned round to the gazing masses, and, extending his right hand, cried out, with the full strength of his magnificent voice, * People, on your knees I* That the thousands, as one, knelt down and bowed their foreheads to the dust ; that the Czar then pronounced a short allocution to them, bidding them ask pardon for their sins, telling them how wicked they were ; how good he was ; that, while he was speaking, some cat-like police agents glided in among the people and took, without a shadow of resistance, some hun- dreds of prisoners, who were noiselessly removed to suffer the Pleidi, or the Battogues, and to be after- wards sent to Siberia ; and that the trick was done. Yet I have heard, in Russia, Russians say that the Czar Nicholas, like Sir Robert Peel THE Sir Robert Peel, I mean was so constitutionally timorous, that a spaniel snapping about his heels, or a monkey leaping on to his shoulder, was sufficient to throw him into an agony of terror. To my mind, the artilleryman, who, meeting the Bengal tiger, stooped down and looked at that beast from between his legs, so that the terrible tiger, not knowing what on earth the strange animal gazing at him could be, howled in atf'right, took to his paws, and enjungled himself in the rattle of a snake's tail, was the only compeer I have ever heard of, worthy to rank, for real courage and presence of mind, with him who bade the people who had massacred the doctors fall on their knees ; and was obeyed. TCHORNl NAROD : (THE BLACK PEOPLE.) 355 The Tchorni -Narod can assert their individuality sometimes, therefore ; but, it is only transiently and spasmodically ; and the fit is followed by pitiable reac- tion. It has been before observed, that an enraged sheep is for the moment nearly as troublesome a customer to deal with as a roaring lion. Almost always the Rus- sian peasant takes his thrashing, and general ill-treat- ment, quietly : nay, will thank his corrector, and kiss the rod. He will not cry out : * How long, O Lord ! How long?' but will bear (as a rule) his to us into- lerable miseries, as long as that miserable life of his endures. But times will come when the sheep goes furious. He has the gids to speak as a shepherd. Then lie rages ; then he storms ; then he whirls round ; then he butts forward in a momentarily potent frenzy ; and then woe-betide Bourmister and Starosta com- mander of punishment and executant of punishment : woe-betide even the noble Boyard ; for Ivan Ivanovitch will rend him asunder, and spare not his noble wife nor his noble daughters, nor the very children that are unborn ; and after this come speedily, reaction, and repentance, and a dreadful retribution on the part of outraged authority. As 1 have pointed out, a riotous crowd a crowd, indeed, at all in St. Petersburg or Moscow, is a novelty and an event to be remembered, and made a thing historical of will my reader ask any Russian acquaintance to relate a few anecdotes of the peasant crowds, who, from time to time, gather themselves together down south towards the east, or in the far west of the gigantic empire in governments you never heard of, in provinces you never dreamed of? You shall hear how some delicate countess who has been the belle, not only of the salons of the northern capital, but of Paris, and London, and Vienna ; who has retired, after some love-pique against a charcje-d' af- faires, or some scandal with her husband, to her vast 2 A2 355 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. estates, hundreds of versts beyond Moscow, and has there devoted herself to the task of torturing her slaves ; has invented and practised such unheard-of cruelties upon her bower-maidens and her wretchedest depen- dents, down to her cooks and scullions, that some direful evening there has been a crowd ; that the crowd have poured boiling oil on her, and have hung her up by the hair of her head, while they have scarified her by drawing infuriated cats over her ; that they have plucked out her nails and her eyes, and singed her before a slow fire, and finally have hacked her to pieces with hatchets, and eaten her brains.* That after the frightful retaliation had been committed came a reac- tion, and terror, and abject cringing. The general commanding the provincial government came down; there was a reign of terror; many were beaten to death : more had their nostrils torn out, and were sent to Siberia, there to work in the mines and in chains, as slaves, for life. You don't see these narratives in the Journal de St. Petersbourg, or in the Abeille du Nord, or in the Invalide Russ, among the catalogue of recent promo- tion in the illustrious orders of St. Anne, St. Wladimir, and St. Alexander Nevsko'i, or among the official de- patches announcing new victories over the Circassians. They do occur though, from time to time. The govern- ment keep them dark : and you hear them after dark and subtle whispers, as ' cette chose terrible qui est arrive dernier ement ' that terrible event in the govern- ment of Orel, or Kharkoflf, or Tamboff, which has hap- pened lately, and which is so very regrettable ; but which will happen again and again, I opine, as long as the Tchorni iNiarod, the Black People of Russia, are ground down and oppressed, as they are in this present era of grace. * At Bagatoi, in the government of Kowrsk, in eighteen hun- dred and fifty-four. THE IKS. 357 XX. THE IKS. THE title of this paper may seem exceedingly absurd. But there are many Iks and Chiks and Niks in Russ- land, whom it behoves to have information about. In the Nevskoi the great avenue of the Tents of Kedar I am so strangely constrained to dwell amongst, and in its immediate ducts, the Great and Little Mors- ka'ias you will see panorama-passing during the day, all the Iks worth noticing. In these streets only will you be able to view anything approaching to the Johnsonian or Fleet Street aspect of City Life. Away from the Nevskoi and the Morska'ias, the vast streets of Petersburg are, at all seasons, little better than deserts. Solitary figures of slaves and soldiers glide by occasionally, ghost-like ; but, on Quay or Esplanade, in Oulitza, Perspective, Ploschad, or Pereoulok, there is (as I have hinted in the Tchorni Narod) nor throng nor pressure and I have seen, at high-noon, standing in the centre of the Admiralty Square, one dog; a mangy cur with a ridiculous tail who, in the insolence of undisputed possession, set his four paws all wide apart, and wagging that truncated handle of his, barked shrilly and scornfully at the high palaces, as though they had been the walls of Balclutha, and he was delighted that they were desolate. Very slowly, but with crustaceous tenacity, has the Nevskoi in its ways, its ins and outs, and its Iks, fixed itself upon me. It was shy and coy at first. Let me, as briefly as I may, essay to go round the clock with you on the Nevskoi, and trot out the Iks, in their morning as well as evening aspects. Remember, this is summer-time; the beginning of July; (for 1 know nothing of Acris Hyems in Russia) ; and take note, if you please, that the time is four o'clock in the morning. I am not at all ashamed to say that I have been out 358 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. all night at least all the time usually set apart in civilized countries for that appalling season of existence at a ball, and that I am rattling home behind an Ischvostchik from the seventeenth line at Wassily- Ostrow ; and, though wrapped in a thick over-coat, shivering with cold. The sun is manifest enough and bright enough in all conscience, and the smiling morn (smiling a polite, heartless, soulless, Sheffield plate, thoroughly Muscovite smile) is busily employed in tipping the gaudy domes with a brighter lustre than their gold leaf gives them. Not a shop, above ground, is open as yet the aristocratic Boutiquiers of the Nevskoi are as late risers as their customers but, in the basement, there are plenty of small ' Lavkas' grocery, chandlery, and bakery shops open; to say nought of the vodki-dens with the great bunches of grapes in gold leaf suspended over their portals, to show, I presume, that wine is not sold there which dram establishments never seem to be closed at all. The water-carts go heavily lumbering past ; then I hear a clanking as of many tin-pots, or of marrowbone and cleaver music, in which the metal unduly prepon- derates ; and see advancing towards me a gaunt, bony, ill-favoured woman in a striped petticoat held up by the usual braces, the usual full-sleeved innermost gar- ments, a crimson handkerchief tied over her freckled face, and streaming behind, like a Bedouin's burnouse when the capuchin is thrown suddenly back from the head. Over each shoulder she carries a heavy arc of wood, like a fully bent bow, but hollowed out in the centre so as to n't her shoulder, and serve as a yoke ; to either end of which are suspended fasciculi of the beforementioned tin-pots, much battered, and with brazen lids and spouts. This is a milk-woman. She does not deliver the caseous beverage from house to house, as with us, but takes her stand at some patented spot generally at the ' Auge' or feeding-trough of a THE IKS. 359 droschky-stand. There are no such things as nosebags in the cabbicular hierarchy in this country ; and, by a most humane provision, the animals are rendered inde- pendent of the caprice, or cruelty, or stinginess of their drivers, and are fed under police superintendence at the public auges or troughs, to whose support all the Ischvostchiks contribute their quota at stated times and in abundance. She either stands at one of these or close to the cabane or wooden hut of a Boutotsnik. Hither come either the dvorniks (yardmen), or the slough (man- servants), or the sloujanka (maid-servants), to lay in a stock of milk for the day. What the Petersburgers, who are not Tartars (for these live almost entirely upon milk) can want with milk, I am puzzled to discover. They almost uniformly drink black coffee after dinner, and seldom indulge in that beverage for breakfast (the rich prefer champagne and Lafitte ; the poor, quass or vodki) ; they drink their tea without milk in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred ; I never saw any remarkable profusion of custards or ice-creams at Russian dinner- tables ; and it is my firm impression that there are no children in St. Petersburg to drink it. There are little men and women, little cadets, little grand-dukes, small Tchinovniks, miniature policemen, Lilliputian admirals, infinitesimal Archimandrites and Protopopes, minified countesses, minute coquettes ; diamond, ruby, and pearl editions of that Book which will be Reviewed some day ; but, of bouncing, bawling, buoyant, bothering, delightful children, there are none to be found here. It makes one shudder here to see the small tots of humanity, who only knew your ankles yesterday, and are scarcely tall enough to be on speaking terms with your kneecaps even now, conversing gravely in two or three languages, and bowing, and scraping, and lifting their caps, and unbuckling their sword-belts, as though, good Lord ! as though they had been bandied about, and worn, and punched, and bitten, as often as a George 360 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. the Third sixpence, instead of being silver pennies, bright, sharp, fresh, new from Nature's mint. The babies here, too the very babies in arms frown sternly on you as they pass by, or solve mathematical problems on their nurses' arms, with their limp tiny fingers, biting their lips thoughtfully the while.* These precocious civil and military functionaries, incipient diplomatists, sprouting philosophers, conquerors what need have they of a milk diet ? Babies though they be, they require strong meat. Give them their bird, let them crack their bottle, light their pipes, lace them the tightest of corsets, * Whenever I go into a strange country I set myself sedulously to work to discover (and this you may perhaps have already inferred) something like a national and picturesque costume. Gene- rally I am disappointed, and find nothing but prosaic hats and coats, bonnets and shawls, black cotton stockings, and linsey woolsey petticoats. I experienced great delight, however, and thought I had at last found a land of handsome dresses, when, walking the streets during my nonage in Petersburg, I lighted upon divers females, generally ruddy, comely often, and clad in the same description of gala costume I have attempted to describe in the holiday dress of the ' Baba.' The most plainly attired had sara- fannes or tunics of crimson silk edged with broad gold lace, embroidered shoes, petticoats of rich stuff, necklaces, massive gold earrings, and kakoschniks glistening with sham jewels and seed- pearls. They invariably had small Russians with them, either in arms or toddling by their sides ; and I conjectured them to be wives of wealthy native merchants ; but I was very soon afterwards, and to my extreme disappointment, informed that they were WET- NURSES ; and that this masquerade costume was worn by them as a matter of course, and '.with as little picturesque truth as John Thomas wears the maroon plush and chrome-yellow aiguillettes of the Countess of Squllpington. These wet-nurses are usually from Southern Eussia. (They say no babies can 'live that are nursed by women from the marshy government of St. Petersburg.) Not one in five hundred of ' them is married. They have a child, and cast it into the Foundling Hospital, get a certificate of health from a doctor, and become wet-nurses in noble families. It is a profession. It is a paying one. A discontented Sloujanka (if she be not a serf) will say, ' This does not suit me ; I cannot support the Barynia. I shall go and be a wet-nurse.' THE IKS. 361 hand them the daintiest of fans, for they are grown up, before they are grown at all. Whoever drinks the milk, there are plenty ofLaitieres and Cremieres in the capital. They have a quarter to themselves too, not exactly in St. Petersburg, but on the other side of the water, in the village of Okhta, where they dwell among their pots and keep their cows. The Petersburg milk-women are, I believe, mainly the property of that colossal slave proprietor (he has a hundred thousand they say) Count TcheremetiefF. SUCH cows, too, the milk-women have ! You may frequently see them being led about the streets, gaunt, bony, woebegone little brutes, and I declare not one whit bigger than Shetland ponies ; or perhaps, indeed, Shetland cows, if the cattle of the Ultima Thule are as diminutive as their horses. It is only very early in the morning that cattle or sheep are seen about the streets ; they are then mostly on their way to Wassily- Ostrow, where are the slaughter-houses and the majority of the summer butchers' shops. I see, still rattling along in this early-late droschky of mine (the Ischvost- chik has not, probably, been to bed for a week, but is considerably fresher than I am), multitudes of horned beasts and sheep, yet for all their numbers, only speck- ling the vastness of the Open, coming adown the great street from the Smolnoi road, along the quays, across the Pont-Neuf or Novi-Most, and so on to their doom to be made meat of. The sheep, albeit somewhat longer- woolled, are much like ours ; they are not ruddled, but appear to be branded with a curious cross within a circle, and a distinguishing letter, on the left flank. I wonder they don't stamp them with the double eagle ! The pigs are truculent, evil-eyed animals enough, with gashed snouts and switch tails. Observing the remark- able bright russet hue of some of these porcine Russians, I can for once acknowledge as a truth that legend of the * Red Pig ' which in my scepticism I had hitherto 362 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. been led to rank, as fabulous, with Guy Earl of Warwick's Dun Cow, and More of More Hall's Wantley Dragon. The sheep (in Russia) are driven by moujiks, clothed in touloupes or loose leathern coats, which, with an utter disregard of delicacy and consider- ation for the feelings of the animals themselves, are evidently made of sheepskin. Their legs the moujiks', I mean are swathed in criss-cross bandages of leather or bark, much resembling the cruciform-leggings worn by Mr. James Wai lack in the melo-drama of the brigand. These Corydons wield the instrument we so often read about, and so seldom see, the real shepherd's crook not the long pole with a squeezed-up hook, which the Sussex pastors carry, but exactly resembling a bishop's crosier. The shepherds have no collies no dogs to worry the sheep, or keep them together ; their crook serves them for all in all ; and they possess a peculiar agility in intertwining the hook with the woolly locks of the sheep's fleece, and then, dexterously re- versing the instrument, driving the end of the staff (sharpened and shod with iron ) into his ribs in a manner calculated to cause great agony to the mutton, but highly conducive to discipline and good order. The pig-drivers have Cossack whips, with thongs about six times as large as the statf, with a little perforated ball of lead, strung, which runs up and down the lash, so that the pig is sure to have it somewhere. This whip makes, when cracked, a tremendous noise ; and from the expression I have observed on the baconian physi- ognomy, I don't think that animal likes it. Finally, the cattle-drivers, clad (also in seeming insult to their vic- tims) in loose capes of pie-bald calf-skin, as if they had been foraging in the Pantechnicon, London, and had robbed some hair-trunks of their coverings. They blow veritable cow-horns, which make an unearthly wailing noise, and sound so discordantly that I very much marvel that the cows don't die of that tune. THE IKS. 363 Over the glassy Neva, blue as the sky that roofs it, with ships from all parts of the world mirroring their cobweb rigging in its depths, over the Neva by the new bridge on to the Quai Anglais, and I am not half home yet. See, here are the Iks all at once, and in great force all over the new bridge without crowding it, and stationary, though there is no show to see, no orator to hear, no time to laze away ; for they are all bound for a weary day's work. That man with a short, stunted, scrubby but thick beard, with the leathern cap and blue cloth band in lieu of the ordinary Ischvostchik's hat ; with the blue- striped shirt, pink-striped breeches, and immutable boots, and fluttering over all like the toga of an ancient Roman in difficulties, or the timeworn, and by stern- creditor-not-renewed mantle of Don Caesar de Bazan a tattered, patched, greasy, stained, villanous, but volu- minous leathern apron is a Batchmatchnik, a shoe- maker. He beside him, with the cunning fox-face, the unwholesome complexion, the bloodshot eyes, the slight stoop in the back, the large hands with lissome fingers crooked somewhat at the tips, the general weary, done- up, hunted-dog look, telling of late hours, arid later vodki ; he who has a square bonnet of stiff' blue paper something like a lancer's cap on his head, a black calico apron over his caftan, and black calico sleeves reaching half-way up his arms, must be a Typograpschtchik a journeyman printer, who has just knocked off work at the bureaux of the Journal de St. Petersbourg in the Pochta-Oulitza, or General Post-Office-street hard by ; or else he has been setting all night in type, positive or superlative lies in some imperial oukase, or edict, or prikaz. Yonder fellow, with the herculean frame, the fair-haired, blue-eyed, full-bearded, Richard- Coeur- de-Lion head, and the eye like Mars to threaten or command (he was whipped yesterday), is it needs not his bared arm, his coarse canvas suit, but always with 364 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. boots, the rope tied round his waist, and the tape round his forehead, and the film of fine drab powder with which he is covered from hair of crown to ball of toe to tell you, a Kammenstchik, or stone-mason. Beside him is his brother in building not an Ik this time but an Ar ; but he may be allowed, I hope, to press in with the ruck a ruddy fellow in a pink shirt and the usual etceteras, with a hatchet stuck in his girdle ; a merry-faced varlet with white teeth, who, if he had but an ass to lead, might be AH Baba ; but who is his own beast of burden, wots of no caverns, and is simply Axinti Ivanoff the Stoliar, or carpenter. He can do more feats of carpentry, joinery, ay and cabinet- making and upholstery, with that single clumsily-made, blunt- looking toula hatchet of his, than many a skilled opera- tive in London who earns his three pounds per week. Axinti, of course, is a slave ; and, being very clever at his trade, is at high obrok, and is very profitable to his master. The facility and dexterity with which the Russian mechanics handle the hatchet, and make it serve in lieu of other tools, are marvellous and almost incredible, are certainly unequalled, save by the ana- logous skill of the peasants of the Black Forest, who are reported to be able to cut down trees, square timber for houses, carve comic nutcrackers and ugly-mugged toys, shave themselves, and cut their meat, all with the aid of one single penknife 1 . The hatchet of the Russian carpenter seems to serve him in lieu of plane, saw, chisel, arid mallet, and (it would almost seem) gimlet and screwdriver. I knew a Russian who declared ' quil avait un pay san ' (' J'avais un paysan ' I had a peasant is as common a commencement to a Russian conversation as ' once upon a time ' to a fairy tale, or ' it is now some eighteen years since ' to the speech of a virtuous venerable in a melo-drama at home) who could glue boards together with his hatchet. No men (I except the Batmen) who have traversed Moscow or THE IKS. 365 Petersburg streets, and have watched carpenters at work, either in their open shops or at the ligneous pavement, can have failed to remark the wonderful dexterity with which they convert a rough, shapeless piece of wood, into a plank, a panel, an hexagonal paving-block, a staff, a batten, a faggot, a quoin, a board, or a shelf. The process seems instantaneous. The carpenters have other tools besides the hatchet, doubtless ; though I never saw a Russian Stoliar with a complete basket of tools beside him. But the hatchet is emphatically an implement germane and to the Russian manner born, as the cloth-yard shaft was to the English bowmen of yore, before the long bow came to be used in England in a manner that our stout ancestors of Crecy and Agincourt never dreamt of. With the hatchet, the Russian moujik hews at the black pine-forests of Olonetz and Wiborg, for logs for his houses, for timber for the Czar's ships ; with the hatchet he defends himself against the grisly bear and ravenous wolf ; with the hatchet he cuts a way for his sledge, in winter, through the frozen snow ; with the hatchet he joints frozen meat, and cuts up frozen fish, and chops frozen vegetables. The hatchet is his principal aid in building his house, and in constructing his furni- ture, and in cutting his fuel : all of which he does himself. If your Kibitk, or Tarantasse, or Telega break down on the road, you holloa out at the full strength of your lungs for assistance ; whereupon a group of peasants presently appear, crying ' Stichasse /' (directly !) who mend your broken trace, or spring, or axle, or re-shoe your near-wheeler, or heal your drunken yemstschik's broken head, with a hatchet ! charging you many roubles for the accommodation. With a hatchet Peter the Great commenced the massacre of the Strelitzas ; with a hatchet some say he murdered his own son ; with a hatchet sometimes, even in these days of grace, the Russian moujik, maddened by drink and despair, 366 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. rushes on the lord who has oppressed him, and with that murderous tool dashes out his brains. It puzzles me that the government should allow the slaves to carry these ugly-looking weapons constantly in their girdles. I shouldn't like to offer my serf fifty blows with a stick when he had an axe in his belt. I wouldn't have minded trusting Uncle Tom with a bowie-knife ; but I should have kept my hatchets under lock and key if I had Sambo, or Quimbo, or Three-fingered Jack about my property. It is not only in the use of the hatchet that the Russian peasant displays extraordinary dexterity, and power of achieving great things, with apparently the most contemptible and inadequate means. There is a well-known anecdote, which I may be excused for re- peating here, of a Russian peasant, named Telouch- kine, who, some thirty years since, contracted for the sum of eighty silver roubles (the materials of course being found him), to regild the spire, the cross, and the angel surmounting it, of the cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul (the burial-place of the Czars, from Peter to Nicholas) in the fortress of Petersburg. He ac- complished this gigantic task without the aid of any scaffolding or platform work whatsoever, simply sitting astride on a little saddle suspended by cords. The spire, from its base to the summit of the cross is sixty- five saycnes, or four hundred and fifty-five English feet in height (455) : the cross alone being eight sageues or fifty-six feet high. I never heard the authenticity of this feat disputed. I have never heard what reward, beyond the eighty roubles contracted for, was bestowed on Telouchkine. Perhaps his proprietor as a com- pliment to his talents increased his yearly obrok ; but I am afraid that when he died, he did not leave his secret to any one. When I left St. Petersburg, the angel and cross in the church in the fortress had fallen, as to gilding, into a woeful state of second- THE IKS. 367 hand-looking dinginess. It had become again a ques- tion of regilding these ornaments ; but, this time, no Telouchkine came forward with an eighty-rouble offer. A most elaborate scaffolding, whose symmetry of pro- portions seemed to me quite astonishing, had been erected round the spire for the use of the workmen. It had cost, I was told, a good many thousand roubles, and was to cost a good many thousand more, before even a book of gold-leaf could be applied to cross, or angel, or spire. No man who knows these poor Russian people with their rude tools, and hands seldom disciplined by regular apprenticeship, can doubt that it is faith that helps them along in such works as Telouchkine accomplished. That strong and blind belief in the Czar and in the saints, in a material reward from St. Peter and St. Paul, St. Sergius or St. George, St. Wladimir or St. Nicholas, in the shape of heaven-sent roubles, or a dupe sent by the saints in their way to swindle, or a cash-box for them to steal (without the possibility of detection), or a miraculous softening of their masters* hearts, and their exemption from the stick for years ; together with a certain hope and trust that for this good deed done to the saints and the Czar, they will be rewarded with a real golden crown, a real white robe, a real harp, a real cloud to sit upon, to all eternity, while the Barynn, the Starosta, and the Bourmister, go to the devil, to be beaten to pieces by Gospodin Schrapschin (Lord Beelzebub), and burnt to cinder by Gospodin Tchort (Lord Lucifer : the Russians are very polite to their devils, and give them titles of honour). This strong belief leads men like Telouchkine to swing four hundred feet high on six inches of wood hung to a hempen cord ; it led the moujiks who built np the Winter Palace in eleven months, and perished by thousands building it, to work cheerfully, patiently, enthusiastically, in the broiling sun and ihe icy blast, 368 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. because it was the Gossudar, the Czar's house, and because the government had caused it to be given out, that the works had been blessed by an angel ; it led the gaunt grey-coated men in the flat caps to fight, and stand and march, and charge, and starve and die uncomplainingly, unyieldingly, heroically, on the heights of Alma and in the valley of Inkermann, in casemates full of blood and smoke; in hospitals, where the wounded could not lie for the dead that were a-top of them ; on bone-covered steppes, in pestilential marshes ; on muddy tongues of ooze, and weed, arid treacherous sand, that skirt the Putrid Sea. Are not these all Iks? for what is the Soldatt, the soldier, but a shaven moujik ? and have I been digressing ? I know, though, these Iks are not those I left on the bridge. There is another Ik. Big beard, red face, but all the rest as white and floury, as the mason is grey. This is a boulotchnik, or baker a journeyman baker, mind ; for were he a master, he would not be a Russian or a serf at all, but a free German. For a wonder, he is not booted, but wears a pair of coarse canvas trousers, and drab list slippers. You must |not confound him with that bow-legged industrial, clad also from head to foot in white, but not floury, who is circulating restlessly among the Iks, and bears before him a flat tray, or shallow basket, full of bread of the multiform shapes the Russians delight in bread in long twisted rolls ; bread in double semicircles, hollow, like a pair of handcuffs; bread in round balls, and bricks, and tablets, and big flat discs, and lumps of no particular shape. Some of this seems white and light enough, almost cake or puff-paste in appearance ; but the great mass is of the approved Rye or Pumpernickel pattern; and, though appetisingly light in its rich brownness without, is, when cut, as dark as the skin of a mulatto. This Ik is a Xhlaibchik, literally Bread-man if indeed THE IKS. 369 Ik or Chik or Nik may be understood to mean man. Perhaps the Ik is only synonymous with our ' er ' in Costermonger, Fishmonger, Fruiterer, Poulterer. The Xhlaibchik is doing a smart trade on the bridge among the Iks (whom I hope you have by this time discovered form part of the Tchorni Narod, the Black people) ; for from four to five in the morning is breakfast time with them. Some other peripatetic tradesmen minister to the co-epicurean wants of the Iks. There is the Tchaichik the tea-man who carries a glowing sa- movar beneath his arm wrapped in a thick cloth, from whose centre protrudes a long horizontal spout and tap. He also carries, by a strap over his shoulder, a flat tray, covered with a fair linen cloth, on which is his array of tumblers, a,nd earthen mugs, pewter spoons, lumps of sugar, (seldom called for,) and slices of lemon, much in demand. He serves his tea, all hot, as the merchant in the cab-rank centre of the Haymarket, London, does his potatoes. The tea is of the very coarsest, bitterest, and vilest of flavour. I tasted .it, and it costs two copecks a tumbler. It is full of strange ingredients that float about in it, herbaceous, stony, gritty and earthy ; but it is not adulterated in Russia, being made from the cheap brick tea mixed with sheep's blood, as coffee with chicory so called from the bricks or ingots into which the leaf is compressed brought by caravans out of China, by way of Kiatka. It is written that you must eat a peck of dirt before you die ; and I think that about four tumblers of hot Petersburg street tea would go a long way towards making up the allowance. There is another Tchaichik the cold-tea-man. He with a prodigious vase of glass, with a pewter top, and through whose pellucid sides (the vase's) you can see the brown liquid frothing with much oscillation, and with much sliced lemon bob- bing up and down in it, leans moodily against the parapet of the Novi-Most ; for the morning air is a, 2 B 370 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. nipping and an eager one, and the cry is, as yet, almost entirely for warm tea. Not so with the Kolbasnik, or dealer in characuterie : there is positively no strictly English word for it, but seller of ' pork fixings ' will explain what I mean. He is a blithe fellow with a good face and a shirt so bright that he looks like a Russian robin red-breast, and goes hopping about among the Iks, vaunting his wares, and rattling his copecks, till a most encouraging diminution begins to be apparent in his stock of sausages, pig's and neat's feet, dried tongue, hung beef, salted pork fat (a great Kolbasnik delicacy, in lumps, and supplying the place of bacon, of whose existence the Russians seem unaware), and balls of pork mincemeat, resembling the curious viands known in cheap pork-butchery in England, I believe, as Faggots. There are, as yet, few women or children crossing the bridge ; and of those few the former are counter- parts of the Okhta milk-woman, without her yoke and bundle of tin cans. There pass, occasionally, silent files of soldiers, clad either in vile canvas blouses, or else in grey capotes gone to rags, whose military cha- racter is only to be divined by their shaven chins, and closely-cropped heads, and long moustaches. These are men drafted off from the different regiments not on actual duty, to work in the docks, at unloading ships at the custom-house ; or warehousing goods ; or at the private trades or occupations at which they may be skilled. They receive wages, which are said facetiously to go towards the formation of a regimental reserve fund ; but which in reality go to augment the modest emoluments of his excellency the general, or his high- born honour the major, or his distinguished origin the captain. The background of these groups is made up by the great Iks of all Iks, the Moujiks, the Rabotniks (the generic term for workmen, as a Moujik and Christian THE IKS. 371 are for slaves), the indefinable creatures in the caftans, who are the verb active of the living Russ condemned for their lifetime to be, to do, and to suffer. This is why they tarry on the bridge on their way to work those multifarious Iks. There is a shrine-chapel at its foot towards Wassily-Ostrow : a. gilded place, with pictures, filagree railings, silver lamps suspended from chains, huge waxen candles continually burning, and steps of black marble. Every Ik, every woman and child, every soldier, every Ischvostchik as he passes this shrine, removes his hat or cap, crosses himself, and bows low before it. Many bow down and worship it literally grovelling in the dust ; touching the earth repeatedly with their foreheads, kissing the marble steps and the feet of the saint's image, and looking devoutly upwards as though they longed to hug the great, tall, greasy wax candles. Not the poorest Ik but fumbles in his ragged caftan to see if he can find a copeck for the saint's money-boxes, which, nailed to the wall, guard the staircase like sphynxes. Drive on thou droschky (of which the Ischvostchik has reverently lifted his hat, crossing himself repeatedly as we passed the joss-house), for I am very hungry and want my breakfast. 372 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. XXI. COMING HOME. COMING home ! what a blissful significance lies in the sound ! I can understand a man going away on a journey that may last, perhaps, for years ; going away full of gay excitement and adventurous speculations. He sees men and cities like Ulysses. The sirens sing to him ; he tarries with Calypso ; he encounters Polyphemus, and worsts or is worsted by him, as the case may be ; he may be even elected king of a strange land, like Rajah Brooke, and reign over Dyaks and Malays ; but he must come home. In all the foreign wanderings, the foreign fetes, perils, love- makings, adventures of every description, there comes that irresistible longing and yearning of the vitals for the old country ; and though enemies or alguazils may await him on every quay of every outport of the three kingdoms, come home he must, and come home he does. I left England when April had but half got through her capricious fit of smiling and weeping ; I returned when dark November was growing old, and its blasts were howling before the portals of the expiring year, like a dog for one who is to die. But my eight months' wandering were not all Russian. You know how I tarried full forty days in Prussian and Danish wildernesses before my destiny and the ice in the Gulf of Finland would allow me to proceed ; and I returned even more laggingly. Let me see how it was. First, there was the coming back to St. Petersburg, after an insignificant touch of Asiatic cholera, which my Russian doctor he was a country one, and spoke COMING HOME. 373 no French considered to be best treated by the ap- plication of mustard plasters and the copious consump- tion of mint tea, which I myself endeavoured to vanquish by volition, sitting up in bed and trying to smoke a chi- bouk and drink weak brandy and water, till I fell back in atrocious agonies, but from which I at length reco- vered, thanks to the unremitting care, tenderness, and skill of some dear friends, who left me very grateful, but dreadfully emaciated, and with a complexion several shades darker than my normal hue. First, I repeat, there was the return to Petropolis, and next came the making preparations to leave it for good, no trifling task, I can assure you. Every reader of Mus- covite travels knows, or should know, that by the laws of Russia (and I doubt whether they will be materially modified even by the comparatively liberal Alexander the Second), it is imperative on every foreigner who purposes to leave the country to advertise three times in the Gazette de FAcade'mie and in the daily police bulletin, and both in the German and Russian lan- fuages, his intention of departure. As I did not appen to owe a single copeck to any one of the czar's subjects, mainly, I believe, because Russian tradesmen and hotel-keepers have, in their dealings with fo- reigners, a convenient custom of being paid beforehand, I got through this formality pretty well. Pending the running out of the three advertisements (which are inserted hebdomadally), I took the necessary steps to obtain that grand desideratum, an outward-bound pass- port. George William Frederick, Earl of Clarendon, and Baron Hyde of Hindon's seven and sixpenny act of grace, was not, under present circumstances, of the slightest good. It depended upon the good-will and pleasure of his Imperial Majesty the Czar of all the Russias generally, and of the military governor of St. Petersburg particularly, as to whether I was to quit the dominions overshadowed by the wings of the double 374 A JOURNEY DUE NORTH. eagle or remain there for the term of my natural life. So I went, or rather, I sent, a Cossack, attached to me for a trifling monthly remuneration in the capacity of body servant, to the Nadziratelle. This functionary, who is a species of commissary of police, was good enough to inspect my carte de sdjour, and having, as I hope, received a good character of me from my Cos- sack and all my landlords and landladies, sent me to the major of police, who (stamped paper was tacked on to my carte, and paper roubles expended at every step) sent me to the chancery of the military governor (no less a person than General Ignatieff, privy coun- cillor and knight of innumerable orders, of which the insignia were in diamonds). There I was told by a bald-headed little Tchinovnik, who spoke French, (my Cossack's services ended at the office of the major ot police,) that in order to obtain a passport I must pre- sent a petition in person to the military governor, and furthermore, that the petition must be written in Russ. I must confess that my progress in the Sclavonic tongue had not been of a sufficiently advanced nature to warrant my adventuring on a supplicatory composi- tion. I could barely answer an invitation to dinner in Russ, and though I had many friends to the manner born, who would gladly have undertaken the task for me, I had by this time lived sufficiently long in Russia to know that this was a matter rather of roubles than of writing. So I asked the bald-headed Tchinovnik if he would be kind enough to draw up the petition for me. This, with great cheerfulness and alacrity, he undertook to do, and the next day he had my petition ready for me. It was very long, beautifully engrossed, and looked very like an act of parliament in hiero- glyphics, I gave him five roubles, at the receipt of which he bowed long and lowlily. He had need to bow and scrape, for I learnt, an hour afterwards, that ninety copecks (about two and tenpence English) was COMING HOME. 375 the orthodox sum expected for the service he had ren- dered me. Then I presented my petition to General Ignatieff. Then he granted its prayer. Then I left Cronstadt for Flenshurg in Schleswig Holstein ; thence to Hamburg ; thence to Brussels ; arid then HOME. 376 A JOUKNEY DUE NOKTH. L ENVOI. IT is the lot of every man who aspires to, who achieves publicity, or who as very frequently happens has publicity thrust upon him, to be favoured by the at- tention of that numerous, and apparently increasing class, the ' people who go about saying things/ I am afraid that I shall never attain sufficient celebrity for these small scandalmongers to take the trouble of reporting that I have gone raving mad, that I have sold myself to a publisher for a thousand guineas per annum, that I was tried at the Old Bailey in early life for the offence of piracy on the high seas, or that I have run away from my wife, and am residing at Monaco with a Mingrelian princess. Yet, when I returned to England, in December 1856, I found that the 'people who go about saying things' had hung upon the very slight peg of its being known in a few London ' circles ' that I was the author of a ' Journey Due North/ an amusing budget of scandal. I have to thank those industrious and well-informed gentlemen, the London correspondents of the minor provincial journals, for their sedulous circulation of a cheerful report that I had been sent to Siberia, that I had been expelled from the Russian territory by the secret police, and that I was dead. This last echantillon of journalistic waggery obtained considerable currency, and I receive to this day occasional communications from anonymous correspondents who are anxious to know whether I am yet in the land of the living.* A bolder gazetteer hazarded the insinuation that 1 was in the pay of the Russian government, and that the * The ingenious and ingenuous Mr. Fitzball, in his recently- published ' Thirty-five Years of a Dramatic Author's Life,' has actually, confounding me with a dear relative, announced my death from disease of the heart. L'ENVOI. 377 somewhat extreme views I had adopted with regard to Russian institutions were but to be regarded as a proof of deep cunning and exceeding Jesuitry. It may afford the last-alluded-to journalist some satisfaction when I publish the confession that I have once visited the Russian embassy in Chesham Place, in the company of a lady who required Baron Brunnow's signature to her passport. If I ever went near the autocrat's ambassador again it must have been in the way common to secret agents, down the area-steps ; and I only regret that I cannot favour my * London Correspondent' with an accurate report of my interview with the Secretary of Legation in the pantry. Perhaps, however, the most ingenious report to which these unpretending sketches gave rise was one that / had never been to Russia at all, and that, establishing a Patmos at Ostend or Ghent some said Brussels, some went so far as Spa I had provided myself with a good library of books of Russian travel, and so ' fudged ' my ' Journey Due North ' in the manner attributed (I believe with about equal justice) to M. Alexandre Dumas anent his Impressions de Voyage. Curiously, now, sitting at home among English scenes and English faces, I am not altogether without grave doubts of my own as to whether 1 ever visited Russia in the flesh, and whether mine was after all but a spiritual journey Due North, a Pisgah view of the Muscovite Palestine. True ; here are my passport scrawled and stamped all over by his Imperial Majesty's police agents ; here is a penknife with the Toula mark on the haft ; here is the rouble-note I brought away (against the law) as a souvenir ; here are my Russian hotel bills, post letters, padaroshnas, giving permission to take post-horses, bankers' borde- reaux ; here the Gazette de L' Academic, where I, the * well-born Lord von Sala ' (save the mark), am described by public advertisement as having the inten- 2 c 378 A JOUKNET DUE NORTH. tion to quit St. Petersburg in .a fortnight from the date affixed. Still do I doubt ; still do those Russian experiences loom so dimly in the distance; still are they so unreal, so shadowy, that by times I am half convinced that my * London Correspondent ' must be right, that I was labouring under hallucination the summer before last, and mistook the Montagne de la Cour for the Nevsko'i Perspective, the Place d'Armes at Ghent for the Tsarinski Loug. It is only when from time to time I visit some dear Russian friends ; when by the pleasant waters of the Avon we talk about old times, about Alexis Hardshellovitch, and the un- darkened nights we spent so happily in gondolas on the Neva, in groups upon the Palace Quay, or in the cool saloons of the Mala Morskaia; when returning home the dear old samovar is lighted again, and the blue smoke of the papiros begins to curl from fair lips ; when the tea gleams in the tumbler, and the delicate lemon floats on the surface, and when some- body's voice murmurs low the plaintive notes of Vot na pouti celo balschoia that I am once more in Russia, that the shadow becomes substance, and that we laugh- ingly bid the London Correspondent go hang for a backbiter. But they are gone too, now, the friends ; and things Russian become mistier than ever. Positively the only course that remains open to me in order to avoid falling into utter scepticism concerning matters ' Due North,' is to revisit Russia. I wonder whether the little old gentleman at Berlin will give me a visa to my pass- port again, and tell me that it is gut nach Russland ? Next time, however, if I am once more brought beneath the talons of the double eagle, you shall know what the Czar's strange land looks like in winter. Adieu. LONDON : PRINTED BX W. CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET. RETURN TO the circulation desk of any University of California Library or to the NORTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY Bldg. 400, Richmond Field Station University of California Richmond, CA 94804-4698 ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS 2-month loans may be renewed by calling 1-year loans may be recharged by bringing books to NRLF Renewals and recharges may be made 4 days prior to due date DUE AS STAMPED BELOW JUN171992 JUL161992 JUU !CD 475945 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY