sing ? Of none. She sits and makes little
plaits in her robe, and spins little gold toys
and says, Signor Fripanelli, what is there of
news en ville. Tell me, I pray you, all the
cancans you heard last night at the Princess
Kapoustikoff's. What, devil ! I go to-morrow
to the Kapoustikoff's, and she says, Tell me,
Signor of mine, what is there of new en ville,
and who are the imbecile whom that old
woman ugly, the Countess Panckschka, can
now persuade to enter her faded saloons.
Deity of mine, this they call taking lessons of
the song ! And if you do not talk cancans ;
if you say that you are a master of music,
and not a merchant of news ; they will write
to you a billet with but this sole line in it,
Monsieur, je ne vous connais plus, Sir, I
know you no longer ; and no longer will they
know you, or the two, five, eight hundred
roubles they owe you, besides their bad
tongues, ruining your fame and honour in
salons with histories of lies that you know
not your art ; that you are of the Jew, and
have been galerian, là bas, down there with
letters marked on your back for theft of
watches from mantlepiece, and have wife
without bread in Bergamo, whom in the time
you bastinadoed because she would not
dance on the cord, (the tight-rope, I
presume)."

The recital of Fripanelli's woes carries us
well out of Dominique's, and his droschky
takes us at an enlivening rate towards the
theatre. Frip has been years in Petersburg,
yet I question whether he has ever walked
ten miles in it since his arrival. " What to
do? " he asks, lifting up his hands, and
shrugging up his shoulders. "To walk,
where? Among these wild men savage, these
barbarous? Of not." He knows the Nevskoï,
the Italianskaïa, the English and Palace Quays,
the two Morskaïa's and the Litennaïa, because
in those streets his aristocratic patrons reside.
He has heard of Wassily-Ostrow, and has
been (in a gondola) to Kammenoï-Ostrow,
the Princess or the Countess Panckschka
having a chalet there in the summer; also to
Tsarski-Selo, and even as far as Pavlowsk by
railway, for he gives lessons to one of the
Grand Duchesses. He has seen the outside
of the Gostinnoï Dvor; but he is quite
ignorant of what manner of markets exist
behind that stately edifice. He knows not
the Gorokhovaïa from Adam; and if you
were to tell him that the Nevskoï started
from the shores of the Neva, at right-angles
to it, and ended three miles off, still on the
shores of the Neva, and still at right-angles
thereto, he would stare with astonishment.* I
could show you full a score foreign residents in
Petersburg who are brethren in ignorance to
Fripanelli, and have been as long in Russia,
and know as little of it as he.

* Here the Neva forms an arc in its myriad windings,
and the Nevskoï is the chord of the arc. The difficulty of
orienting oneself without a compass in Petersburg, or
finding out whether you are steering topographically is
positively distracting. Owing to the twistings and twinings
of the river, the innumerable back waters, branches,
canals, and bridges, you may walk five miles and still
find yourself over against where you started from.

This good-natured little music-master is
madly in love with the Queen of Sheba.
He is most respectful and quite hopeless in
his attachment, never telling his love to its
object, but allowing concealment to prey on
his olive cheek. Watching him however at
his music lessons, while the Queen is singing,
(and she sings divinely) I catch him furtively
wiping his right eyelid with the extreme end
of a very fine cambric handkerchief. He
composes romances and cavatinas for the
Queen to sing, which, when she sings, makes
him urticate his eyelid more than ever. He
weeps frequently to me over coffee on the
subject. Elle n'a pas de l'ame. " She has not
of the soul," he says. " If she knew how to
shed the tears as well as how to beam the
smiles, she would be la Donna of the world.
But she cannot. Elle n'a pas de l'ame." And
so we go to the Circus.

Which, beyond being externally circular in
form (with the ordinary quadrangular
excrescences inseparable from round
buildings), and having been, it may be, originally
built with a vague view towards equestrian
performances at some future period, has
nothing whatever to do with horses. For, as
you already know, it is the home of operas
sung in Russ.

We heard Lucrezia Borgia, and I confess
that I was most agreeably disappointed.
I became convinced that the epithet " soft
flowing Russ" is one eminently due to the
mother tongue of our late enemies. It is,
indeed, for vocal purposes a most mellifluous
and harmonious language, and, for softness
and euphony, is about five hundred per cent,
more suited to musical requirements than the
French language. As to its superiority over
our own (for singing), I at once, and candidly
admit it. I don't think that from my due
northern antecedents, I shall be accused of
entertaining any very violent Russian sympathies,
or that I shall be denounced as an
emissary of the Czar in disguise, when I
appeal to all linguists to bear me out in the
assertion, that our own English tongue is the
very worst language in the world for singing.
There is an incessant hiss in the pronunciation
which is as annoying as it is productive
of cacaphony; and I would sooner hear
Lucrezia half-a-dozen times over, in Russ
than in English. As to the opera itself, it
was, as I dare say it is all the world over — at
the Scala, the Pergola, and the Fenice; at the
St. Charles at New Orleans, at the opera in
Pera, at the Tacon theatre in Havannah, at
our own great houses, or in country theatres,
occupied for the nonce by some peripatetic
opera company — always beautiful, glorious,
fresh, and one which shall endure for aye, like
the grand old marbles of those who have gone
before, though legions of Goths and Vandals,
though myriads of Keemo Kimos and My