in his shirt, hiding behind a screen; the
incoherent torrent of adjurations and menaces
in French and Russ; and then the dreadful
knocking at the outer door; the fear of
rescue (though, indeed, it was but another
band of conspirators arriving); the overturn
of the lamp, and the end of that monarch.
I say, seigneurs and ladies, you have walked
and talked with some of those who supped
and killed afterwards. They are very old,
white-headed men now, high in office,
decorated from the nave to the chaps, great
diplomatists, adepts in statecraft; but there
was a time when they were dashing young
officers in the guards, and they saw in reality
that which Alexander saw only in
imagination. They could tell you whether it was
Platon Zouboff or Count Pahlen who smashed
Paul's skull in, with the hilt of his sword;
they could tell you whether it was Pahlen
or Benningsen who knelt on the Czar's breast,
and put him out of his misery by strangling
him with an embroidered scarf. I wonder
whether the survivors of that scene ever
think of the matter at all! Whether at
congress table, or court ball, or civic banquet, in
opera-box, or silk-lined carriage, or actresses'
boudoir, they ever think of the overturned
lamp, the sword-hilt, and the scarf. Does
the Avenger of Blood pursue them, does
Atra Cura, the black horseman, ride behind
them? Or do they look at the twenty-third
of March, eighteen hundred and one, as a
mere boyish freak— a peck of wild oats which
they have sown profitably, and reaped
abundant crops of protocols and paraphes,
stars, crosses, and titles from?

Haud obliviscendum, indeed! Life would
be impossible without a shower-bath of the
waters of Lethe every quarter of a century
or so; without the sponge being applied
when the slate is too full, and the tub of whitewash,
being brought in when the schedule
has swelled too grossly. This man, I know,
forged when he was twenty—rector's churchwarden,
now. This, stole a goose, and was
whipped for the theft, somewhere in the
West Indies—high up in the Wooden-Spoon
Referendaries Office now. This, robbed his
father, deserted his children, broke his own
wife's heart, and ran away with another
man's—knighted last week. This, was the
most covetous hunks, the hardest-hearted
usurer, the unjustest steward that money-
bags have been clutched by since Harpagon
or Hopkins—he is dead. The Reverend
Hango Head, M.A., is writing a Latin
epitaph for him, and his disconsolate widow
has ordered a memorial window, setting
forth his virtues (in pre-Raphaelitically
painted glass) in the chancel of Saint
Jonathan and Saint Gyves Great Wilderton
Church.

Once again the Black People met, silently
and timorously to learn that they had changed
masters, when, in eighteen hundred and twenty-
six the news arrived of Alexander's death,
and the cruel Constantine abdicated, and the
Czar who was to do so much and so little for
good and evil, for the glory and the shame of
Russia, had to seize his diadem, perforce with
ensanguined hands, and wrap a gory shroud
round his imperial purple. As before, the
Black People had neither act nor part in the
events of which they were frightened
spectators. Constantine or Nicholas, it was not
one salted cucumber, one copeck's-worth of
black bread, one beaker of quass, the more, to
them. The boyards alone were to change
masters; and they were to be the slaves of
slaves for ever and ever. The real crowd
was one of soldiery, who fought regiment
against regiment, some for Nicholas, some for
Constantine; some for a cloudy myth of a
constitution and a republic their leaders had
got, heaven knows how, into their muddled
heads—perhaps while in garrison in some
German town among moon-struck illuminati
in eighteen hundred and thirteen; some for
they knew not what,— for a fancied millenium,
perhaps, of more vodki, and the stick being
broken and cast into the pit for a thousand
years. They fought in the Great Admiralty
Square till the crisp snow was patched with
crimson pools, and the cavalry horses,
dabbling in them, pimpled the expanse with
their hoof-nails for hundreds of yards around.
So, as all men know, General Miloradovitch
was slain; the cannon began to thunder; the
Czar Nicholas came to his own; Pestel and
the others were hanged; princes and counts
and generals went in chains to Siberia; and
the Tchorni-Narod, having stripped the
corses of the slain lying on the now russet
snow on the Admiralteskaïa Ploschad, went
to sell the old clothes and trinkets in the
Tolkoutchji-Rinok (Great Elbow Market),and
then to their several avocations of droschky
driving and quass selling, and hewing the
wood, and drawing the water.

There was to come a time though, when,
for once in their oppressed lives, the Black
People were to make a public appearance as
a Mob, tumultuous, ferocious, and dangerous.
The crowd of the moujiks in the Sinnaïa or
Haymarket of St. Petersburg, is the one
historical crowd in which the people were
actors and not looking on. This was in the
first year of Asiatic cholera declaring itself
en permanence at St. Petersburg. It is now
domiciled there en permanence, and the
Tchorni-Narod are as accustomed to it as to
dirt, or to vermin, or to the stick. The
government had very praiseworthily taken the
best sanitary precautions for the prevention
of, and had adopted the most accredited
remedies for the cure of, this awful malady. It
seemed like a stern measure of retribution
meted out to the wicked rulers of an
oppressed people, that where they were really
endeavouring to do good the Tchorni-Narod
rebelled against it. They could swallow the
camel of tyranny—they strained at the gnat
of benevolence. The Government had sown