they must perish. No assistance is attempted.
Everything is left to the police, unless the
evidence be very strong that all danger is over. I
saw three very respectable young men—two
Germans and a Russian—drowned in the Neva, not
a hundred yards from the shore. Their small
pleasure-boat was capsized, in one of those
sudden gusts peculiar to this climate; one sank at
once, the other two got on the keel of the boat
and shouted for help. But, although many
looked on, and plenty of boats were at hand,
no rescue was attempted. Another gust came,
after a time; the boat was light and was again
capsized, keel down. Then round it went a
third time, keel up; but this time it was empty.
The two young men never rose, their lives being
lost when they might most easily have been
saved if prompt help had been given. I have
seen in a passage to Cronstadt from Petersburg
(twenty miles) four dead bodies floating in the
river. Although hundreds saw them as well as
I, they scarcely turned their heads to look, and
no remark was made. The bodies were allowed
to float on down the river into the gulf, like logs
of wood, and at the time of the ice breaking up
this is a daily occurrence.

One morning my servant woke me at six
o'clock, saying that a man had been murdered,
and was lying nearly opposite my house on the
road. I got up, and on proceeding to the spot,
found a man lying in a pool of his own blood.
His head and face seemed to be much smashed,
but he was not dead. He implored help and
water, but although there were many persons
standing round about him, not one would
venture to move hand or foot for his assistance.
He had been attacked and thus bruised in a
public-house, and thrown into the road three
hours before I saw him. A woman had seen
him thrown out and immediately informed the
"stanovog;" but although the place was not a
verst from his house, this worthy did not trouble
himself to appear on the scene until four hours
had elapsed, and he had been thrice summoned.
There, meanwhile, the man had lain in the frost
and snow untouched. I saw him carried to the
hospital, and heard that he died an hour
afterwards. This man also might have been
recovered had he been taken in hand as soon as
found.

As I was leaving my house one morning, I
heard my assistant, Harry, shouting to me from
the door of an outhouse for holding firewood.
On entering the place, I found a dead peasant
lying on the floor with a piece of rope round his
neck, and from a beam the other end of the rope
was dangling. To my inquiry, Harry replied
that he had gone into the place for a piece of
wood to make a handle to an axe, and found
the man hanging by the neck. The first
natural impulse caused him to open his knife and
cut him down, and there he was lying. I found
the man quite dead, as he had been for some
time.

"Now," I said, "Harry, you have got yourself
into a nice mess. The police will make you
responsible for this death. What's to be done?"

"Done?" says Harry, "why, tie him up
again."

This never would have occurred to me, but
Harry was a practical man, and he was right.
So we managed to hang the poor fellow over
again, and left the spot, happily without being
seen. The body was found during the day, and
a "stan." sent for, who never suspected the part
we had acted in the tragedy. If he had, I have
no doubt it would have cost us many roubles to
save Harry from being tried for murder.

COTTON-FIELDS.

THE constant reader of the newspapers—
especially of those journals which circulate in the
districts of Great Britain devoted to the
manufacture of cotton—has read, any time during the
last thirty years, not a few reports of conversations
at meetings of chambers of commerce and
similar gatherings, upon the cotton supply; with
comments upon these conversations by the
regular leader-writers, and innumerable letters
to the editor. These reports and comments
embodied a prevailing presentiment, a
prophetic warning of danger respecting the supply
of the raw material, which employs the
industry of about a couple of millions of our
people. Sharp men of business, pluming
themselves upon some special kind of knowledge,
often sneer, in private circles, at the prognostications
of public writers; forgetting that as man
is the interpreter of nature, the writer is the
interpreter of opinion. Of the wisdom pervading
communities, and not of individuals merely, are
public writers the penmen. For thirty years
then, at least, the penmen of public opinion
have been emitting warnings respecting the
precariousness of the supplies of raw cotton. Eleven
years ago—in eighteen hundred and fifty—writing
urgently on the necessity of the English cotton
interests looking farther for sources of supply
than America, we said, "War with America, a
hurricane in Georgia, a blight in Alabama,
continued rain in New Orleans, are one and all
death-cries to the mill-spinner, and power-loom
weaver; for, when the cotton-fields of the
Southern States yield less than their average
quantity of cotton, the Manchester operative
eats less than his average quantity of food. He
flourishes or decays with the cotton-pod. Cheap
bread is to him a less important question than
cheap cotton. When his blood boils at the
indignities and cruelties heaped upon the coloured
race in 'the land of the free,' he does not always
remember that, to the Slave States of America he
owes his all, that it is to his advantage that
these states should remain untroubled—that the
negro should wear his chains in peace. It is for
his gain that slavers dare the perils of slave-
dealing, since his loom is furnished with the
produce of the negroes' forced exertions. While
one, and one only source exists for the support of
his loom, he is dependent upon slavery."* The
chief abettor, therefore, of the Slave Trade has

*Household Words, vol. ii. p. 225