infamous bodies, but as I have made a
vow (among a great many vows, one of a
charmingly Asdrubalic, Hannibalic nature,
which has revenge for its object), against
digression, I will be as succinct as I can, and,
treating of the judicial police first, take you
at once to the nearest police-station.

This is called a SIÈGE or Seat, synonymous
with the police Præsidium of German towns.
The head of the judicial or municipal police
of St. Petersburg (under the great Panjandrum
and Archimandrite of all the Russian
bobbies— the chief of the gendarmerie who
has that house on the Fontanka) is called the
Grand Master of police. He has his
acolytes, and his offices, and chancellerie, and
attributions. He is Commissioner Sir Richard
Mayne, in fact, subject to the beneficent control
of a police home secretary. Under this
Grand Master, the capital is divided into
districts and arrondissements, each having a
central station, bureau, barrack, prison,
hospital, torture-yard, fire-engine house, and
watch-tower. The amalgamated entity is
the Siège.

Take a Siège and place it in one of the
score of linies that run in grim parallels
across Wassily Ostrow.*

* I have frequently been on the point of giving way
to a pleonasm, and speaking of the Island of Wassily
Ostrow— Ostrow, Ostrov, or Ostroff, meaning itself an
island— which would render me amenable to as much
ridicule, I opine, as that Parisian café proprietor who
advertised in his window that Eau de Soda Water was
always to be had on the premises. As regards the
etymology of Wassily Ostrow it is written that in Peter
the Great's time it was but a swampy islet in the Neva
(it is now nearly entirely built upon) with but one small
fort, which was under the government of one Basil,
pronounced by the Russians Vacil. When Peter, from
his wooden house in the Island of Petersburg, had occasion
to send despatches to his isolated lieutenant, he was
accustomed to address his letters thus:— "Vacil na
Ostrow"— To Vacil at the island. Contraction and
ellipsis soon took place; and no man wots of Governor
Basil now. Wassily Ostrow is full of houses: the Byrsa
or Exchange, the Custom-house, the School of Mines, the
Academies of Arts and Sciences, the Great Cadet School
— all these magnificent edifices are there; and the swampy
islet, the wooden fort, and Peter Velike's lieutenant are
forgotten.

You have a vast stone packing-case— a
sepulchre of justice carefully whited without.
Above the door there must be of course the
usual lengthy inscription in Russ which is to
be found on every public building in Russia,
about Heaven, the Czar, and the imperial
something or other. Everything is imperial
Due North. The packing-case, understand,
is not the whole of the building. It might be
said, with more justice perhaps, to resemble
a very squat, unornamented copy of the New
Houses of Parliament; for, from one corner
rises the Victoria Tower of the Siège, in the
shape of that celebrated watch-tower you
have already heard about— in the Nevskoï,
close to the Gostinnoï Dvor and the town-hall,
as also at Volnoï-Volostchok. The
watch-tower may, and frequently does rise
to the height of one hundred feet; this one
appertaining to a police Siège that has been
but recently erected, is of solid stone. Wooden
buildings of every description are common
throughout Russia; but, it is an inflexible
and laudable principle with the government
never to allow any building of wood in a
town once destroyed to be built up again of
the same combustible material. Wood or
brick must be the only wear, or the house
itself never rise again from its foundations.
Within the balcony on the summit of the
tower, and round about the iron apparatus
of rods and uprights on which the different
coloured balls and flags denoting the phases
of a fire are displayed [a yellow flag flies
during the whole time a conflagration is
actually raging], walk round around, in moody
contemplation of the vast marble panorama
spread out at their feet, two grey-coated
sentinels, searching with impassible gaze into
the secrets of the city, and signalling with
equal indifference a fire at the monstrously
magnificent Winter Palace, or a fire at the
log-built cabin of some miserable lighterman
who dwells in the slums of Petersburg far
down among the ooze below the arsenal and
the tallow warehouse. What matters it to
them or to the master they are compelled to
serve— the Sultan Kebir— the Czar of Fire?
For, is not fire like DEATH, and does it not
                         .... æquo pulsat pede
         Pauperum tabernas, regumque turres?*

* .... beat with an equal foot at the huts of peasants
and the towers of kings.

At the base of the watch-tower there
stretches out, in a line with the packing-case,
a long stone wall, with a door painted bright
green in the centre; when that door is open
you may, peeping through it, descry the yard
of the fire-engine establishment, and see,
ranged under sheds, the fire-engines and
water-carts. The former are clumsy-looking
machines enough; the latter are simply barrels
upon wheels, like the old Parisian water-carriers'
carts; but, all are painted bright green
picked out with scarlet. I am not digressing
in speaking of the Petersburgian fire-brigade
while my topic is the Petersburgian police,
for the fire-engines and the men who serve
them are under the immediate control of
Boguey. The Russian fire-engineers do not
appear to take that pride and pleasure in the
smart, trim, dandified appearance of their
engines, hose, buckets, fittings, and general
plant, which so eminently distinguishes the
bold Braidwood brigadiers of London, and
the grisette-adored, brass-helmeted sapeur-
pompiers of Paris. They seem dull, listless,
ponderous fellows— afflicted with the general
police malady in fact— and look upon the
engines as though they had taken them in
charge, and were afraid of their running
away. You would imagine that in Russia
where the equine race is remarkable for
strength, swiftness, and endurance, the
fire-engine horses would be the very best
in the world. It is not so. By a strange
perversity of martinet desire to keep up