he departs in a droshky to the house of a
friend of his, likewise a German and a tailor,
who resides in a remote Pereoulok in the
neighbourhood of the Alexander-Nevskoï
convent, and there for three or more days
and nights inebriates himself with Brantwein
or corn brandy, specially imported from
Germany by his sartorial friend: blowing a
trumpet from time to time as a relaxation.
Meanwhile, the culinary arrangements are
under the control of the misanthrope who
wants to go back to Cassel, and the dinners
are very bad.

Another view I have, of a huge court-yard,
surrounded by staring walls—all belonging
to Heyde—round which run pent-houses or
sheds, and beneath which are harboured
droschkies, whose gaberdined drivers snore
on box and bench till a pink-shirted
messenger comes to pummel them into action,
and tell them that a fare is waiting for them.
The roofs of these pent-houses are leaded,
and on them (how keeping their
perpendicular I know not), more kerchiefed women.
are beating carpets; they beat carpets at
Heyde's—tell it again to the nations—with
willow rods; and more pink-shirted men are
thrashing the dust out of fur pelisses, or
peacefully slumbering on their diaphragms
in the sunshine. Another view I have, through
a window, and round a corner, of a strip of
thoroughfare between two blocks of houses,
which, from the droschkies, the grey-coated
soldiers, and the clouds of dust, must be either
the Cadetten-Linie, or the Line (or street)
parallel to it. And last of all, I can peep into
a little private court-yard—I suspect the one
appertaining to Barnabay's own separate and
special apartments—where two little children,
a boy and a girl, are gravely exercising
themselves on stilts. Stilts in Russia!

Stilts in Russia; and why not more than
these? for as, dazed with the blinding
sunlight, I come into the gloomy interior of the
family vault, and cast myself into an easy
old arm-chair (it would hold two with
comfort), I hear from a wandering band that
have just entered the Balschoï-dvor, or great
court-yard, first the hacknied but always
delightful strains of the Trovatore, and then—
but I must be dreaming—no; they are
actually playing it, She wore a Wreath of
Roses.

I see it all now. I have only been a few
miles away from town to write this journey.
Due North is but the North Kent Railway:
this is Dambledowndeary, not Wassily-
Ostrow: the Shoulder of Mutton Inn and
not Heyde's Hotel. Be it as it may, it is
extremely hot; and if there be any law in
Russia or in Kent against taking a siesta in
the middle of the day, I have violated it. I
go fast asleep, and live a life I never shall
live fifteen hundred miles away; then wake
to hear the cook's bad Russian, and to find
the sun a trifle lower in the heaven.

This is the time for a gondola on the Neva;
so I leave the family vault to the ghosts,
and Heyde's to its devices.

CALUMET ISLAND.

WHAT Gibbet Street* is to the thieves of
London the back woods of Canada are to the
riif-raff population of the entire world—a
home. In those vast forests are to be found
men from every European country, and speaking
every variety of dialect; men whose
sole object is to obtain the means of existence
far away from the homes of their youth,
from places where they might be recognised,
from people who might know something, and
care to know more, of their antecedents.
There, in those vast solitudes, spending their
days in felling trees, and in forming the huge
logs into rafts which are floated down the
majestic Ottawa, you will find fallen types of
almost every nationality. From our own
country you will see the big, burly "rough,"
with his receding forehead, sunken eyes, and
heavy, massive jaw, side by side with the
wan, dissipated-looking merchant's clerk, the
warrant for whose apprehension for forgery
is even now preserved in the desk of Daniel
Forrester or among the archives of the
detective police. There, too, are black-bearded
bright-eyed Frenchmen, ardent devotees of
the barricades and the bonnets-rouges; short,
stout, fair-haired Germans, friends of the
deceased Robert Blum and subscribers to
Freiligrath's poems; olive-skinned Italians,
whose real history would be a fortune to the
English penny-romancer; swarthy Spaniards,
whose dislike to a return to their native
country can be accounted for, some on Carlist
reasons, others on account of their unfortunate
partiality for the West Indian traffic, with a
passing allusion to three hundred negroes in
the hold of a slave-ship; lying Greeks, and
even renegade Turks. In intense bodily
labour, in the bitterest fatigue, these men
seek mental oblivion, the forgetfulness of past
crime, or dread of future discovery; there,
the knowledge of companionship in misery
checks all indiscreet inquiry, and the daily
task is performed, the residue of life worn
out, and the grave attained, without the
lifting of that veil which covers all bygone
misdeeds with its solemn folds.

* See Household Words, vol. xiii., p. 193.

The little town of Bytown, even now
risen to be called the City of the Ottawa
—and, from its position as the central
medium for traffic between the States and
Canada, destined to be soon one of the
principal cities of the colony—is, perhaps, the
only recognised haunt of men in which these
wild tribes are ever to be seen. Thither, they
are compelled occasionally to come; there, is
the great dépôt whence they supply
themselves with provisions to last them during
their protracted exile; there, they effect their
engagements with the various large timber
and raft owners by whom they are employed;