same colourless durable clothing all the year
round, and has no amusements whatever which
cost money. Indeed, it is very observable that
the largest establishments of the most ostentatious
Russians do not as a rule maintain splendid
menials. On great occasions of state and
ceremony, indeed, they thrust everybody they
can catch into fine liveries, and very funny they
look in plush and profuse embroideries; but
generally a nobleman may have a hundred
servants, all equally ragged and disreputable.
Directly the grand occasion, whatever it may
be, has passed, the fine liveries are all taken off,
and frequently forgotten for a generation in
some lumber-room. Meanwhile everybody
about the place dresses in such motley
garments as they may have chanced to pick up.

Next in importance to the Dvornik comes
the coachman of a Russian household. He is
usually chosen for his fatness and the length of
his beard. These seem curious reasons for
choosing a coachman in a country where coach-
boxes are smaller than anywhere else in the
world; but whereas the average breadth of a
Russian coach-box is scarcely more than twelve
inches at the outside, the average breadth of a
Russian coachman is a very different affair.
None but Dutchmen of the most orthodox
proportions can be compared with them in
majesty of aspect when viewed from behind.
Their general rotundity is something quite
admirable; and as they are clothed in long cloth
gowns reaching from their beards to their heels,
they appear to be of nearly the same size all the
way down, like enormous animated polonies of a
blue colour. They are not, however, of
precisely the same size, owing to a curious
practice which they have of covering the back part
of their gowns below the waist with pipes like
those of an organ, filled with horsehair, which
act like the roughings or projections made in a
horse-shoe for frosty weather, and enable them
to sit securely on their little coach-boxes, and
take a firm grip of them by the ridges artificially
made in their garment especially for that
purpose. Servants were always so plentiful in
Russia, previous to the emancipation of the
serfs, that their duties came to be subdivided
in a manner unknown in countries where labour
is free to command its fair value in wages.
The overgrown and disorderly establishment of
a Boyard costs him really far more than the few
well-trained and busy servants who are found
sufficient for all the reasonable wants of the
most opulent families in civilised countries;
but as there was no visible outlay of money
to pay the horde of half-dressed and useless
people who prowled about houses in Russia,
they were multiplied infinitely. No landowner
ever seemed to consider that by maintaining a
number of lazy people in idleness at his house,
he took away an equal number of stout arms
from reproductive labour in a thinly inhabited
country, and that it was partly from this
cause that so many of his fields remained
untilled. The spirit of sober calculation and
forethought is of all mental qualities that which
is most wanted in Russia, and most seldom
found.

A coachman in his way is as much a despot
as the Dvornik. As long as he does not
transgress any of the sanitary regulations under
control of the latter, he is supreme over the
coach-house and stabling. The value of the
property thus entrusted to him is very large;
and drunkenness is so very general a quality
among Russian servants that the few coachmen
who will either consent to remain permanently
sober, or who may be relied upon only to get
drunk at certain fixed periods, stipulated and
understood beforehand—such as the principal
festivals and Saints' days of the Church,
Sundays, and generally when there is anything
particular for them to do—such treasures
command almost any wages they like to ask. Their
demands are as exorbitant as those of
accomplished French cooks, and they are quite as
wayward and capricious. They expect everything
to be done for them, and even to be
lifted upon the coach-box by obsequious underlings.
Once there, they will consent to drive;
and they drive at such a pace and in such a
manner that the soundest horses are usually
crippled in a few days by their treatment.
Indeed, a Russian gentleman's horse, free from
blemishes, caused by brutal over-driving and
rough treatment, is never seen. The coachman
being lifted on his box and fixed securely
between the ridges in the skirt of his gown, seizes
one of the reins in each fat, clumsy, awkward,
hand. The ends of these reins are usually
covered with red or yellow silk to give him a
firmer grip of them. He commences his business
by crawling along at a footpace, till he
hears some carriage behind him, and then it
becomes his main object in life not to allow
that carriage to get in front. Those who have
lived in Russia will perfectly understand the
practical value of these efforts. When roads
are a foot deep in dust during the summer, and
in slush during the winter, it is a doleful
method of performing a journey, to do so
behind another carriage. The immense cloud
raised by a pair of horses and four wheels, will
darken the air on the sunniest day like a thick
fog, extending for fifty yards on all sides of
them. No sooner, therefore, does the coachman
hear the sound of distant wheels than he
pricks up his ears and gathers his reins. Then
he calculates the distance between him and the
carriage behind with painstaking accuracy,
slackening his own pace, to quite a crawl. The
enemy, or hinder carriage and its occupants,
deceived by these appearances, probably make
a rush to get past, and come up at a furious
pace for that purpose. But just as they get
within dust range, the torpid mass in front
shoots off like a steam-engine. A few deep
curses, a blinding cloud shutting out the sun,
moon, and stars, and all nature from them, and
behold they are converted into so many millers,
with respect to their personal appearance. Then
begins a misery long drawn out, which quite
puts an end to all the pleasure of their ride.