and buying the wrong thing with the swaggering
air he learned long ago, when a few copecks
were, maybe, little heeded by him; when he
was squandering his patrimony at St. Petersburg,
or gambling it away with idle comrades in
some wild station of the Caucasus. Few but
the imprudent or the utterly self-sacrificing are
old and poor together. It is mostly a man's
own fault if he is in penury at sixty; but even
poverty sits less ungracefully on a soldier than
on other men, and the spare military figure in
parley with yonder huckster is a picture not
without a certain dignity and pathos. He has
bought a hard stringy sort of sausage, and no
bread. Poor old boy! no wonder he is so thin.

Chaffering with a blowzy farmer's wife is our
epicure's housekeeper, or perhaps some anxious
caterer for a sick child, or some loving wife,
indulgent to her husband in all things, wise, for
his sake, in fat fowls and fine fish. See what a
mistress of the craft she is! How closely she
examines everything; with what a right honest
mind she values a single copeck; how carefully
she counts out her money, insists on the right
change— a troublesome thing to get in Russia—
and lastly, how well she has employed the
contents of her little purse! Do women love a
bargain, or do they only bargain for love, careful
over other goods? and is thrift a form of
affection, having its quiet unsuspected heroism?
Most of us would buy respect with an open
hand, but for some loving thought. It is so
pleasant to be prodigal that the selfish generally
are so.

Near this buxom dame is the chief cook of a
profuse noble, purchasing large quantities of
provisions, with an eye to his sweetheart's table
where he sups of an evening when his saucepans
are cool. He does not bargain or haggle over
prices. The more he spends the larger will be
his gains. He would accept no place without
the perquisites of marketing, and would not
enter the service of a shrewd arithmetician for
twice his present wages. Not far off, is a
drunkard, bloated and untidy, with a guilty
defiant eye and blackguard mien. He is talking
with a companion, on whose rough face toil,
thrift, health, and prosperity are written by
Nature's own hand. The toper has evidently a
dim consciousness of his own degradation, but
he feels reckless, and turns aside from hope very
fiercely. Wandering about, too, hither and
thither, are the usual market swarm of elderly
gluttons in straitened circumstances, whose
souls are in their bellies. They love to gloat
over food, to finger it, to buy rich morsels at
small price, to prowl about the larders and
sculleries of the world. It is easy for young
ambition and restless enterprise, for the happy
or the busy to sneer at these poor dirty old
creatures, wallowing in grease and cheap
sensuality: no man's mind is in his stomach at
twenty. But suppose any one of us had
out-lived love, hope, ambition, friends, and had
only a few pence aday to warm and nourish
him, would it be very wonderful if he felt
cold and hungry from scanty meals and an
empty fireplace, if he thought the market a
cheerful walk, and were eager for a bargain
with a friendly butcher or with Vera Feodorevna
for her last lean fowl and dozen of small-ish
eggs? Such a bargain might become the
event of his dull day. He might like to be
known among his starveling cronies as a rare
hand at an omelette or a winter soup; and
vanity might console itself even with that scrag
of a reputation. Many a smart hussar and
dashing guardsman, many a fine dandy, has
passed the evening of his life a-marketing.

The aspect of our streets is that which one
might fancy would belong to a distant French
colony whose inhabitants had never learned to
spell. We paint our wares generally outside our
doors, the art of reading not being by any means a
general accomplishment among us. We are not,
however, altogether without literature, and we
can easily make up our deficiency by signs and
tokens. " Telieure per meliter et cevile," with
a uniform coat and a pair of civilian trousers,
we consider a neat and appropriate ensign to
set up at a tailor's shop. A horn of plenty
pouring out boots and shoes, with the word
CORDºNiE is, in our opinion an ingenious sign
for a cobbler, the o and i being added ornamentally
after consultation with a learned friend.
Bread, stays, hats, saucepans, show each of our
callings so plainly that all who run may read of
them. Sometimes we write French word modiste
with Russian letters, which looks odd; or we
write Russian words with French letters. But,
whether we write in French or in Russian,
our constitutional weakness in orthography is at
once apparent. Besides our regular shops, we
have a large class of itinerant street tradesmen:
glaziers with their glass waiting for a job,
furniture-makers with tables and chairs freshly
varnished to hide the cracks, screen-makers,
hawkers of birds, and hawkers of lobsters with
a single lobster for a stock-in-trade, lobsters
being a rarity. The most curious of these
street-tradesmen are, however, the very ancient
community of money-changers: they are
generally Polish or German Jews; they set up their
portable pulpit-shaped tables along the busy
streets; each table has a little wire-covered
cage in one corner to keep the money; a sharp-
eyed, hook-nosed man, very dirty and greasy,
sits under a huge white umbrella, keeping watch
over it (for we are a light-fingered race), and
there is need of vigilance. He has no fixed
price for his goods. A man of business may
get change at five or six per cent., a flat or a
sprig of fashion will pay twenty. The sharp
greasy man intends to die worth a million. Small
change is scarce in Russia; though it might be
made plenty for the cost of print and paper,
there being little coin in circulation.

Piled up in heaps upon the ground are many
strange foreign fish, unknown in our waters:
the sturgeon, mother of appetising caviare, first
guest at our dinners, the sterlet, the soudak, the
sword-fish, the horny-scaled turbot, and others
of a shape monstrous as those which scared
back the diver of the ballad. They must be