door, and perforating the centre of the stone
packing-case, there runs a vaulted corridor of
stone and of immense length, ending at last
in a back-yard with very high walls, of which
I shall have to tell presently.

Opens into this corridor, a bureau or
counting-house, or writing-room — call it by
what name you will. From a great deal
table with inkstands resting in holes cut in
the wood, and from a multitude of clerks
scribbling furiously thereat, you might
imagine yourself in the reporters' room of the
office of a daily newspaper in the old days,
before the comfortable cushioned-seated
writing-rooms were attached to the
reporters' gallery of the Houses of Parliament;
you might imagine these scribblers to be
gentlemen of the press, transferring their
short-hand notes of a day's sitting in the
Commons into long-hand. But they are not:
these are Tchinovniks— police and government
employés— of the very lowest grade,
for no person of noble birth would, under any
circumstances, consent to serve in the police.
The lowest grade in the Tchinn confers
nobility per se; but, that nobility is not
transmissible; and though a police-office
clerk belongs to the eighteenth grade, and
has the right to the title of Your Honour, his
son after him is no more than a free moujik,
and is subject to the stick as well as Ivan
the moujik and slave. The employés of the
police are mostly recruited from that
mysterious and impalpable body who in Russia
do duty as a bourgeoisie or middle-class, but
do not at all answer to our ideas of what a
middle-class should be, and utterly fail, as
Curtii, in filling up that yawning gulph
that separates the Russian noble from the
Russian serf. They are sons of military
cantonists, who have shown some aptitude; they
are orphans adopted by the government, and
educated in one of the government schools;
they are priests' sons, who have declined,
contrary to the almost invariable rule, to
embrace their fathers' profession; they are
waifs and strays of foreigners naturalised in
Russia, of Germans trade-fallen (many of
the higher police employés are Prussians), of
Fins under a cloud, of recreant Poles, of
progeny of bygone Turkish and French prisoners
of war. An abominably bad lot they
are. See them in their shabby uniforms, with
their pale, degraded faces, and their hideous
blue cotton pocket-handkerchiefs with white
spots: mark their reeking odour of stale
tobacco-smoke, onions, cucumbers, and vodki:
watch them scrawling over their detestable
printed forms— forms printed on paper that
Mr. Catnach of Seven Dials, London, would,
be ashamed to send forth a last dying speech
upon— but all duly stamped with the Imperial
stamp, and branded with that imperial
bat, which is nailed on every imperial barndoor
in Russia, the double eagle. Let all this
pass. They may not be able to help their
shabbiness, their evil odour, or their evil
looks; but, their evil doings are open and
manifest, and infamous. A police-office
employé is known to be— with the single
exception of an employé, in the Custom-house
at Cronstadt, who may be said to whop all
creation for villany— the most dishonest,
rapacious, avaricious, impudent, and mendacious
specimen to be found of the Tchinovnik.
And that is saying a great deal.

Lead from this bureau, but not from the
corridor, sundry chambers and cabinets,
where, at smaller tables covered with shabby
green-baize, sit chiefs of departments of the
great Boguey line of business; but, all filling
up the same forms, spilling the same ink,
nibbing or splitting up the same pens, raining
the same Sahara showers of pounce, and signing
the same documents with elaborate signatures
in which there is but a halfpenny
worth of name to an intolerable quantity of
paraphe or flourishing. Heaven and Boguey
himself only know what all these forms are
about; why, if it be true, as the Russians
boast, that there is less criminality in St.
Petersburg than in any other capital in
Europe, there should be two score clerks
continually scribbling in the office of one
police-station. It is true that the Russian
police have a finger in every pie; that they
meddle not only with criminals, not only
with passports, but with hotels, boarding
and lodging houses, theatres, houses not to
be mentioned except as houses, balls, soirées,
shops, boats, births, deaths, and marriages.
The police take a Russian from his cradle,
and never lose sight of him till he is snugly
deposited in a parti-coloured coffin in the
great cemetery of Wassily Ostrow. Surely,
to be an orphan must be a less terrible
bereavement in Russia than in any other
country; for, the police are father and mother
to everybody— uncle, aunts, and cousins, too!

The major of police is a mighty man, and
dwells in a handsomely furnished cabinet of
his own— lofty and spacious, and opening
also from the vaulted corridor. Here he sits
and examines reports, and, not filling up those
eternal forms, deigns to tick off his approval
of their contents, and to affix his initials
to them. Here he sits and interrogates
criminals who are brought before him
chained. Here he decides on the number
of blows with stick, or rod, or whip, to
be administered to Ischvostchiks who have
been drunk over night, or to cooks who have
been sent to the police-station to be flogged
for burning the soup, or serving the broccoli
with the wrong sauce. Here he sits, and
here he Takes.

Taking, on the part of the police, is done in
this wise. As the recommendation and even
licence of the police is necessary to every one,
foreigner or native, who wishes to establish
an hotel, an eating-house, a café, or a dramshop,
in St. Petersburg, it is very easily to
be understood that the expectant Boniface
hastens to square the police by bribing them.