in ignorance; they reaped in revolt. The
great hospitals of Ouboukhoff and Kalinkine
had both been placed under the
superintendence of German physicians, who
exerted themselves to the utmost to treat
successfully the almost innumerable cases of
cholera that were daily brought in.

The average number of cholera cases in St.
Petersburg alone, in the summer last past,
was, according to the Gazette de l'Académie
(as reliable a Russian document as, I believe,
can well be found), three hundred and ten
per diem. Of the average in Moscow I have
no information. The vast majority of these
cases were among the Tchorni-Narod, and
were fatal. This can easily be understood,
if we remember the diet and positively
Nomad habits of the masses in Holy Russia.
The Ischvostchiks frequently sleep on their
droschky benches, in the open air, exposed
to every fluctuation of the always fluctuating
weather. The dvorniks or yardmen always
sleep al fresco, wrapped in their sheepskin
touloupes or pelisses. The mechanics and
labourers who come into St. Petersburg, for
the summer months, from the outlying
provinces of Carelia and Ingria, sleep also à
la belle étoile, wherever the most convenient
scaffolding or mortar heap can be found; and
there are thousands of the Black People who
sleep wheresoever, and under whatever
circumstances, they can. The Russians, who are
so studiously looked after by the police, to
the minutest shade of passports and police,
are, perhaps, the people in Christendom who
habitually, and to the greatest extent, possess
the key of the street. When, in addition to
this, it is borne in mind that the Russian
moujik scarcely ever tastes meat, and that his
ordinary food is salted cucumber, black bread,
and quass, the prevalence of cholera in St.
Petersburg will be easily accounted for.

The people, in their miserable ignorance of
right and wrong, caught hold of an idea. This
idea was no doubt industriously disseminated
among them in the first instance by agents of
that secret Democratic and Socialist party
which—Siberia, the mines, Count Orloff's
cabinet and its scourgings, exile, confiscation,
fortress-dungeons and espionage notwithstanding
—existed occult, indomitable, and active as
Balzac's Treize has always continued to exist
in Russia from the time of the first French
Revolution. The idea was that the moujiks
their brethren were being systematically
poisoned by the German doctors, and by express
direction of the Government. For once Ivan
Ivanovitch forgot that the Czar was his
father, his pastor and master, his guide,
philosopher and friend, and Heaven's vicegerent
upon earth. An analogous report of the
wells having been poisoned was, it will be
remembered, current among the populace in
Paris in the first year of the cholera's visitation,
and several émeutes took place; nor in
England, in eighteen 'thirty-two, were there
wanting alarmists of the Mrs. Grundy school,
to ascribe the pestilence— on the one side to
the machinations of the disappointed borough-
mongers; on the other to the malevolence
of Levellers, Radicals, and Trades-Union
men. Ivan forgot the power of the police
and his own helplessness. He and his
comrades in thousands stormed the hospitals,
massacred the doctors and their assistants
under circumstances of the most shocking
brutality, threw the beds and bedding out of
the windows, carried off the patients (to die,
poor wretches, in carts and cellars, and under
vegetable-stalls and horse-troughs); and then,
like a mob of schoolboys who have screwed
up their courage to pelt an unpopular usher,
and who afterwards with outward words of
boasting and rebellion, but with an inward
sinking of their hearts into their highlows, bar
themselves into the school-room, defying the
masters, but knowing full well that authority
will get the best of it, and that Birnam Wood
will be brought to Dunsinane, for brooms to
thrash them with;—the Ivan did his barring
out. All cowering and wondering that he could
have been so bold in the Sennaïa; entrenching
himself behind trusses of hay and piles of
fruit and vegetables—beneath the bulks of
butchers' stalls and among crates of crockery
(for they sell all things in the Haymarket);
armed with such rude instruments of
defence as hatchets, and straightened scythes
attached to poles, and the great three-pronged
forks with which the bread is drawn from
the peetch, or stove; he awaited the coming
of the troops.

I have no doubt, that had the soldiery
really arrived and set to work, the moujiks
would have suffered the most violent cannonade
and musket practice, without attempting
to move until they were routed out by the
bayonet. Their energy was over; their
rebellion was, thenceforth, inert and passive.
But the Czar Nicholas knew too well the
temperament of his children to send against
them, or horse, or foot, or artillery. To
cowhide your slave: good; but to destroy
valuable property by taking your slave's life,
none but a foolish slaveholder would do that.
It is an old story, but worth the telling
again, that Nicholas, unattended by escort, or
aide-de-camp, or groom, was driven in his
single droschky, with the one single Ischvostchik
before him to drive him to the place of
the revolt. That, arrived on the Sennaïa, he
quickly alighted, and, wrapped in his grey
coat, and helmed and plumed, stalked through
the masses of rebellious thousands (who made
an astonished vacillating lane for him to
pass) towards the church with the four
cupolas, and the dome with the silver stars,
that stands in the right hand upper extremity
of the Haymarket. That, ascending the
marble stairs of that fane, he prostrated
himself before the image of the saint that stood
in the porch; and then suddenly turned
round to the gazing masses, and, extending
his right hand, cried out, with the full