Argyle gents, compositors, barristers,
apple-women, authors, and ticket-of-leave
men?

I know that my intentions, in the first
instance, were conscientious. " Be it mine,"
I said, the very first night I laid down in my
bed in the family vault at Heydes, " to take
this Russian people, and spread it out
between sheets of paper like caviare in a
sandwich, for the million at home to digest as
best they may. But, dear and forbearing
reader, I couldn't find the people. Over
sixty millions of souls does this empire
contain; yet types of character are not to be
picked up at the rate of more than one a
day, on the average.

A Russian crowd is as rare a thing to be
met with, as Johannisberg at a second-rate
hotel, or a fine day in Fleet Street. Moscow
coronations do not happen every day,
notwithstanding that stock story told of Peter,
Alexander I., Nicholas, and the present
sovereign, as well of, if I mistake not, our George
the Fourth, and the French Charles the Tenth,
of the enthusiastic but inconsequent young
lady, who was so delighted with the Kremlin
solemnities, that she begged the Czar to let
his subjects have another coronation as soon
as possible. Popular gatherings are studiously
discouraged by the government. The moujiks
cry Gossudar, Gossudar! (The Lord, the Lord!)
when the Czar comes flying along in his
droschky; if they must needs be near him, they
crouch down, bareheaded, and bite the dust.
Islers, the Sommer-Garten, the Wauxhall, at
Pavlowsk, and the gardens of Tsarski-Selo—
which, in St. Petersburg, like the Sparrow-hills
and the Hermitage Gardens, at Moscow, are
very nearly all the places of out-door public
re-union in the two capitals— are tabooed
to the moujik; dancing al fresco is forbidden;
street shows are forbidden; street bands are
forbidden. I have not the slightest wish to
be suspected of pretending to polyglot attainments;
yet such a suspicion may perhaps
arise from the names drawn from different
languages I have given to different buildings
and things in St. Petersburg. The Russian
name for the Sommer-Garten is (I believe)
the Dvorsovaïa Sad, yet it is very rarely
translated into French as the Jardin d'Eté;
but is almost invariably spoken of by the
Russians (when speaking Russ) by the German
appellation of Sommer-Garten. Perhaps
it was laid out by a German gardener. Again
the Police-Bridge is scarcely ever called by
its Russian name (save when directing an
Ischvostchik) of the Polizeisky Most, but is
accepted and Gallicised as Le Pont de Police.
Again, I never heard the English Quay
(Angliskaïa Nabirejenaïa in Russ) so spoken
of by a Russian, even when speaking
English; it is always Le Quai Anglais; and,
lastly, Basil's Island or L'ile de Basile is
peremptorily restricted, this time, to its
Russian name of Wassily-Ostrow. At fires, the
soldiers, the firemen, and the thieves (a
fire is quite a government affair in Russia,
and a member of the imperial family, if not
the Czar himself, is almost always present)
form a crowd of themselves; and the moujiks
run away for fear of being pressed to pump,
and beaten if they do not pump hard enough.
When there is a crowd, you may be certain
that it is on the occasion of a national holiday,
or a national tumult—for this tightly reined-
in country enjoys both occasionally. There
are, you know, the Montagnes Russes, the
Ice Mountains of the New Year, the Blessing
of the Neva's Waters; the Katchelis and
Shows of the Blinni Week, the eggs and kissings
in all sorts of rings at Easter. At other
times there are not even groups to stud the
pavement of the enormous Perspectives and
Ploschads; and though you know St. Petersburg
to have a population of three-quarters
of a million inhabitants, you might everywhere,
save in the Gostinnoï-Dvors (where
there is no crowd, but a continuous stream of
human beings of all classes) fancy yourself in
a howling desert. I had a balcony once on
the Nevskoï, and could, with my blind-man's-
holiday eyes, see from the Anitchkoff Bridge
to the Admiralty clock spire (of course with
the aid of a good opera-glass), which is at
least a third of the length of that unrivalled
street. I have seen it, between three and four
o'clock in the afternoon, what one might call
—vehicles, horses, and a few regiments of
cavalry and infantry marching past, being
taken into consideration— thronged; sable-
spotted as a turnpike road in England might
be by half-a-dozen anthills slowly disgorging
themselves thereon (this was exactly the
position, so high was my balcony, so vast and
far extended the sweep of vista); but I
never saw a crowd collected on roadway or
foot-pavement, that could equal in a tithe of
numerical denseness, the gathering one sees
every day on a Paris boulevard round a
captured pickpocket, or the man in the
helmet who sells the lead-pencils to the
music of a barrel-organ fixed on to the top
of his carriage, or the industrial in a
blouse, who cuts (on his knees) a pane of
glass into fragments with a diamond of
dubious water, the original (of course) of
which he afterwards sells you for the small
sum of one sou; or that can come up to
the assemblage to be brought together
twelve hundred times every day in Fleet
Street or the Strand, by PUNCH, or a horse
falling down.

So rare are crowds in this teeming city,
that even the public infliction of the KNOUT
(which, to the honour of the Russians,
is rarer still of occurrence) fails to bring
the Tchorni-Narod together; and, when
a murderer or a brigand is knouted, the
attendance of a certain number of the
Black People is made compulsory. I
am not going to describe the knout, or the
process of its infliction; and I don't think
I have mentioned it, as yet, by name, half-a-