How good the pickled herrings were at the
Oude-Doelen at the Hague! What a famous
four-poster they put you into, at the Old
Bible in Amsterdam! Could anything be
better than the table d'hôte at the Hotel
d'Angleterre at Berlin—  save, perhaps, that
at the Hotel de Russie, close by, and that
other Russie at Frankfort? That Drei
Mohren, at Augsburg, was a good house,
too. What a cellar! what imperial tokay!
'Tis true that the waiter at Basle swindled
you in the matter of the Bremen cigars which
he declared to be Havanas; but was not that
little mishap amply atoned for at the Schweizer
Hof, Lucerne, six hours afterwards? The
Schweizer Hof! Dear me! how happy you
were, idling about all day long, peering at
Mount Pilate, or watching, with never-ending
interest, the tiny boats on the bosom of
the great blue lake! Here is an envelope
directed to you at Cernobbio; another at the
Villa d'Este: another at Bellaggio, on the
Lake of Como. Here come Salò and Desenzano,
on the Lake of Garda. Ah! a villanous
hostelry the last; but with what exultation
you hurried back through Brescia to the
clean and comfortable Hotel Cavour at
Milan! You were rather short of money,
perhaps, when you arrived in the capital of
Lombardy. Your stock of circular notes
was growing small. No cash awaited you
at the Albergo Cavour—- nay, nor letters
either. But there would be letters for
you, it was certain, at the Poste Restante.
Quick, Portiere, "un broum"—- Milanese
for brougham, and not very wide of the
mark. You hasten to the Poste Restante.
There the letters await you; there is the
stack of circular notes. Yes, and here
among your envelopes at home, is the
banker's letter of advice, enumerating a
hundred cities where he has agents who will
gladly cash your notes at the current rate
of exchange, deducting neither agio nor
discount.

The postage and the reception of a letter
in foreign countries—notably the less
civilised—are events accompanied by
circumstances generally curious and occasionally
terrifying. I never saw a Chinese postman,
but I can picture him as a kind of
embodied bamboo, who presents you with
your packet of correspondence with some
preposterous ceremonial, or uses some
outrageously hyperbolical locution to inform
you that your letter is insufficiently
stamped. As for the Russian Empire,
I can vouch, personally, for the whole
postal system of that tremendous
dominion being, twelve years ago, environed
with a network of strange observances. The
prepayment of a letter from St. Petersburg
to England involved the attendance of at
least three separate departments of the
imperial post-office, and the administration of
at least one bribe to a dingy official with a
stand-up collar to his napless tail coat, and
the symbolical buttons of the "Tchinn" on
the band of his cap. As those who have
ever made acquaintance with the stage
doorkeepers of theatres, in any part of the
world, are aware that those functionaries
are generally eating something from a
basin (preferably yellow), so those who
have ever been constrained to do business
with a Russian government clerk of the
lower grades will remember that, conspicuous
by the side of the blotting pad (under
which you slipped the rouble notes when
you bribed him), there was always a
soddened blue pocket-handkerchief, the which,
rolled up into a ball, or twisted into a thong,
or waved wide like a piratical flag, served
him alternately as a sign of content, a
gesture of refusal, or an emblem of defiance.
You couldn't prepay your letter without
this azure semaphore being put through the
whole of its paces; unless, indeed, previous
to attending the post-office, you took the
precaution of requesting some mercantile
friend to affix the stamp of his firm to your
envelope. Then, the official pocket-handkerchief
assumed, permanently, the spherical,
or satisfied stage; and you had, moreover,
the satisfaction of knowing that the
stamp of the firm might stand you in good
stead as an Eastern firman, and that, in all
probability, your letter would not be opened
and read as a preliminary to its being
despatched to its destination.

So much for sending a letter; on which
you seldom failed (purely through official
oversight, of course), to be overcharged.
There were two ways of receiving a letter;
both equally remarkable. I used to live in
a thoroughfare called the Cadetten-Linie,
in the island of Wassili-Ostrow. It was
about three times longer than that Upper
Wigmore-street to which Sydney Smith
declared that there was no end. When any
English friend had sufficiently mastered the
mysteries of Russian topographology as to
write "Cadetten-Linie" and "Wassili-Ostrow"
correctly, I got my letter. This was
but seldom. It was delivered at the hotel
where I resided, in a manner which reminded
me vaguely, but persistently, of the spectacle
of Timour the Tartar, and of the Hetman
Platoff leading a pulk of Cossacks over the
boundless steppes of the Ukraine. The postman