a greasy ray of assurance, that though your
dinner may be dear and dirty, it shall be hot
and oleaginous. Finally, the landlord, with
the grin and the rubbed hands, conducts you
in a mincing canter up many staircases and
through many corridors; and you are
unpassported, unbooted, undressed, and in
bed, in about the same manner I have
described in the last chapter. Now, all
of this takes place inside Heyde's, but not
one atom on the exterior thereof. You
may come in a droschky, or one of the
flaming Nevskoï omnibuses—licensed to
carry other passengers besides human ones—
or in a hearse, or in the Lord Mayor's coach,
supposing the transportation of that vehicle
to be possible; but not the slightest attention
will be paid to you, till you get in. You
might as well be that Mr. Ferguson who was
told, that although other matters might be
arranged on an amicable footing, he could
not lodge there (wherever "there" was), on
any consideration. Inside Heyde's there is
pleasant gnashing of teeth over a good German
dinner; outside Heyde's there is wailing
at the apparent impossibility of getting any
dinner at all.

But I am inside Heyde's now, and have my
bed and board there. I stay at Heyde's a
month and mark its ways, and note them with
the informer's pen. To have done with
the apologies, I hope I have explained that
outer delay on the Heydian frontier
satisfactorily; to have done with the hand-
bell let me tell you that unless you
have your own servant with you (and
to have a servant I should counsel every
traveller in Russia who possesses the means;
and if he possess them not, what the deuce is
the good of his travelling in Russia at all?)
you have not the slightest chance of having
any attention paid to your wishes as regards
refreshment, or anything else unless you
tinkle a hand-bell. The Russians
understand wire-bells no more than they do chimes;
they must have the immediate and discordant
jingle. It is no good calling "Waiter!"
"Garçon!" "Tchelovek!" or "Kellner!"
—without the bell. Tchelovek, or as the
case may be, calls "Sitchass!" (directly) but
cometh not; but, ring your hand-bell
(Kolokol) and he is at your beck and call
instantaneously. He hears and obeys. He will
bring you anything. He will stand on his head
if you gratify him with copecks sufficient.

Very good to me are my bed and board at
Heyde's. Cheerful when I wish it. Lonely
when I so desire it. Let us have the lonely
object first.

I have bought at an Italian artists' colourman's
on the Nevskoï, un pinceau de Rafäelle,
—a box of water-colours,—Newman, Soho
Square; how strange the Prince of Wales's
plumes and "Ich dien" on the cakes look
here, in Muscovy!—at a price for which I
could have purchased a handsome dressing-
case and fittings, in London and Paris. When
I am tired of the noise and turmoil of the
buffet (for I am alone in Russia, as yet, and
have very few acquaintances and no friends)
I retire into the family vault and make
sketches of the strange things and people I
have seen in the streets. They are very
much in the penny-valentine manner of Art
pre-adamite, rather than pre-Rafaellite.
Then I make manuscript transcripts of matters
Russian that have been written on the tables
of my memory during the day, on infinitesimal
scraps of paper in a hand-writing whose
minuteness causes me not to despair of
being able to earn my living some day by
writing the decalogue within the circumference
of a shilling. These, being desperately
afraid—perhaps needlessly—of spies and
duplicate-key possessors, I hide furtively in
the lining ot my hat, wondering whether—as
usually happens to me—I shall manage to lose
my hat in some steamboat-cabin or railway-
carriage before I land in England, and be
compelled to purchase in Dover or Brighton
(I will except Southampton, whose hats are
excellent) the hardest, heaviest, shiniest of
English country-made Paris velvet-naps. My
last hat was a Dover one, and impressed such
a bright crimson fillet on my forehead that
I must have looked uncovered, like the
portrait of one of those Jesuit
missionaries you see in the Propaganda, who
have gone to China, and have been
martyred. There is amalgamated with this
low art and furtive note-making, a strong
suspicion of a Turkish chibouk somewhere
in the room—a real Turkish one, with a
cherry-stick tube—no mouth-piece (amber is
a delusion, save for show,—kiss the pure
wooden orifice with your own lips and let
the Latakia ascend into your soul to soften
and enliven it) and a deep red clay bowl,
inscribed with fantastic characters in thready-
gold and as fragile as the tender porcelain—
the egg-shell china—our great grandmothers
really delighted in, and our contemporaries say
they delight in, and don't. Also, between
this and the Gulf of Bothnia, there is, perhaps,
on a table in the family vault, a largish tumbler
filled with a steaming liquid of a golden
colour in which floats a thin slice of lemon. It
is TEA: the most delicious, the most soothing,
the most thirst-allaying drink you can
smoke withal in summer time, and in
Russia. But it is not to be imagined, that,
because this tumbler of tea is exquisite, I
have foresworn cakes—or ale.

I have grown to love the family vault; it is
gloomy, but cool and clean; it is so large that I
am continually finding out new walks about it,
and continually exercising myself in its
outlying districts. There is a fair quantity ot furniture
dispersed about its roomy suburbs, but
this is so thoroughly inadequate, when its
size is taken into consideration, that were
Heyde (represented by Barnabay) to furnish
it thoroughly, so as to give it an air of being
decently crowded with moveables, I doubt