made repulsive and shocking, which every
great town presents; and that human faith
cannot believe in the Divine endurance of
such iniquity as the standing by and looking
at it, without a terrible retribution.

It is further expected that the subject will
occasion half as much interest at Westminster,
and draw half as full a Lower House, as
a pitched battle of " I say you did" and "I
say you didn't " between M. and N., or as the
appearance arm-in-arm, instead of fist to fist,
of A. and Z. This extravagant notion, as by
far the greatest of all the extravagances we
have recorded, may aptly close the list of
Stores for the Day of All Fools.

CHIP.
HOVELLING.
A STUDENT in the Northern languages
ventures to suggest that the term Hoveller,*
by which the Broadstairs Life-Boatman is
locally known, may be a corruption of the
Danish word Overlever, signifying Deliverer.
* See page one hundred and thirty-nine of the present
volume.

This is the more likely, as most of our sea
terms are derived from the Danish, Dutch,
and Norwegian languages.

A JOURNEY DUE NORTH.
TCHORNI NAROD: (THE BLACK PEOPLE)
THE Black People I am going to tell
about are not of the unhappy race of Ham,
though they are intimately connected with,
and are, indeed, the bone, and basis, and
marrow of, the Domestic Institution of the
Russian empire. The Russians (I feel a
glow of pleasure come over me when I
have anything positively favourable to say
of them) are entirely free from any prejudice
against negroes. I think, on the whole,
they would rather have Uncle Tom made
Governor of Woronesch, than find an
individual of German extraction appointed to a
clerkship in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The people's— the Tchorni-Narods'—notion
concerning negroes is peculiar and preposterous,
but harmless. They call them Obeziania
monkeys; and, perhaps, imagine them to be
bipeds of the genus Simia, who have compromised
themselves by speaking, and who, as a
natural consequence of their indiscretion, have
been made to work, like any other inferior
human beings. The poet, whom his countrymen
delight to call the Byron of Russia, was
the lineal descendant of a negro slave,
purchased by Peter the Great when very young;
he was sent to Paris to be educated, and afterwards
rose to high command in his service.
Yet he never suffered any discredit through
the sable complexion of his great-grandfather.
He was M. de Pouschkin; and held lands
and serfs, and fell in a duel with a Russian
noble. Had he been born in a, say, less
despotic country, that damning evidence in
his finger-nails would have been sufficient to
banish him from every table-d'hôte; from
every railway car, and from every place of
worship, save the black one; and to place him
in danger of a cowhiding if he presumed to
walk on a public promenade with a white
woman. Yet the Russians are as white as I
am— or as you are.

The Tchorni Narod is briefly the generic
name familiarly given to the great popular
element in Russia: the Black People are the
equivalents for our great unwashed, or
enlightened public, or raffish mob, or free and
independent citizens, or swinish multitude, or
the masses, or the lower orders, or
whatsoever else you choose to call the English
people, according to your high and mighty
taste. The Tchorni Narod is the people
that enlists, digs, delves, cheers, throws
brickbats, takes the horses of His Serene
Excrescence the Grand Duke from his
carriage, and draws him in triumph to the
palace; tears his S. E. into small pieces
sometimes, and carries his head about on a
pole; is drunken, mad, vicious; prudishly
moral, indignant, indulgent, enthusiastic, icy
cold, by turns, and, for a short time; that
surges about like a sea and has its ebb and
flow, its tempests and calms, as capriciously
as that monster; that brings forth pale
children, and is not washed nor taught,
but works, and is beaten, and soddens, and
starves.

How many weeks have these journey-notes
been cast on the waters of publicity, and how
little have I told of the real people I
came all these leagues to observe, and study,
and paint in words, and strive to understand
and distil the truth from! The Ischvostchik;
the Starosta and his belongings down
at that grey Russian Dumbledowndeary of
mine yonder; the bearded man in the red
shirt at Heyde's; and a moujik I have caught
up here and there, staring in at a shop
window; these are all the popular Russian
types I have as yet given. Yet, what should
I myself think of an American, or a French,
or a German—or to speak prospectively—
of a New Zealand traveller, who came
among us, English people, to depict our
national manners and customs, and who
confined himself chiefly to sketches of eccentric
foreigners he had met at table-d'hôtes in
Leicester Square or Soho, to the description
of a Spanish boarding-house in Finsbury, a
German sugar-baker's in Whitechapel, a
Chinese crimp's in Rotherhithe, a Lascar
beggars' den in Referden Street, an Italian
organ-grinder and image haunt off Leather
Lane, a French café in the Haymarket, the
Portuguese walk on 'Change, or a Parisian
ballet at Her Majesty's Theatre;—leaving
out all the real true-born British characteristics
of London: the cabmen, prizefighters,
oyster women, costermongers, jockeys, crossing
sweepers, policemen, beggars, Quakers,
garotters, Barclay and Perkins's draymen,