"Horrible!" cried Mrs. Lecount, interrupting
the ghostly narrative by a shrill little scream, and
making for the door, to Mrs. Wragge's unutterable
astonishment, without the least ceremony.
"You freeze the very marrow of my bones.
Good morning!" She coolly tossed the Oriental
Cashmere Robe into Mrs. Wragge's expansive
lap, and left the room in an instant.

As she swiftly descended the stairs, she heard
the door of the bedroom open.

"Where are your manners?" cried a voice from
above, hailing her feebly over the banisters.
"What do you mean by pitching my gown at
me, in that way? You ought to be ashamed of
yourself!" pursued Mrs. Wragge, turning from
a lamb to a lioness, as she gradually realised the
indignity offered to the Cashmere Robe. " You
nasty foreigner, you ought to be ashamed of
yourself!"

Pursued by this valedictory address, Mrs.
Lecount reached the house-door, and opened it
without interruption. She glided rapidly along
the garden path; passed through the gate; and
finding herself safe on the parade, stopped, and
looked towards the sea.

The first object which her eyes encountered,
was the figure of Mr. Bygrave, standing motionless
on the beach—a petrified bather, with his
towels in his hand! One glance at him was
enough to show that he had seen the housekeeper
passing out through his garden gate.

Rightly conjecturing that Mr. Bygrave's first
impulse would lead him to make instant inquiries
in his own house, Mrs. Lecount pursued her way
back to Sea View as composedly as if nothing had
happened. When she entered the parlour where
her solitary breakfast was waiting for her, she
was surprised to see a letter lying on the table.
She approached to take it up, with an expression
of impatience, thinking it might be some tradesman's
bill which she had forgotten.

It was the forged letter from Zurich.

RUSSIAN TRAVEL.

COTTON.

ANOTHER topic is suggested by the question of
dress. Every Russian peasant, male and female,
wears cotton clothes. The men wear printed
shirts and trousers, and the women are dressed
from head to foot in printed cotton also. When
it is remembered that Russia contains something
like thirty-three million of serfs, besides other
classes amounting to twenty millions, all using
this article more or less, one can estimate the
demand for cotton goods. But a calculation is
not to be made from data afforded by free and
more prosperous countries. The peasantry are
poor, the cotton prints are dear. Hence there
is not a tithe of the right amount of consumption.
Still the cotton trade in Russia is a large
trade, and it is supplied chiefly by native labour
in mills—containing machinery made in Oldham
and Manchester, and superintended by Englishmen
from the same and neighbouring towns.

There may be five or six millions of spindles
at work spinning this cotton. Together with
the weaving and printing of the same, that forms,
indeed, a large item, perhaps the largest, among
the manufacturing processes of Russia, and
employs a capital of thirty millions sterling.
The largest mills are in the neighbourhood
of St. Petersburg, one of these having some
hundred and twenty thousand spindles, and a
few others are of seventy thousand and sixty
thousand, but the great bulk of the trade is in
the Moscow district, and scattered about the
land in that direction. The number of spindles
there may not be so great in any individual mill
as in some of the large Petersburg establishments,
but the mills are more numerous, some
of them nearly as large, and all of them are of
respectable dimensions, even according to an
English estimate.

The chief causes producing this large
manufacturing trade are, of course, the great demand
and a high protective tariff, which excludes the
cottons of England from the Russian market.
England and Englishmen, have derived the chief
benefit from it notwithstanding. The mills are
all filled, as I have said, with English-made
machinery; a good deal of English capital is
invested in them, and they are almost universally
managed by English skilled workmen at high
wages.

It is a notorious fact that although
cotton-spinning has been in operation in Russia for
upwards of fifty years, and constantly on the
increase, the people necessarily becoming
practically acquainted with all its details, still they
cannot dispense with English superintendence.
Wherever native superintendence has been tried
it has failed. And it will always be so,
notwithstanding the admitted abilities of the Russians
as workmen, until a moral and intellectual training
as freemen gives them confidence in their
own powers, secured to them to induce exertion
and competition in skill with their opponents of
more favoured lands. But, account for it as we
may, it is a disgrace to all concerned that no
works requiring the least practical care, and the
commonest skill in superintendence, can yet
be carried on successfully without the help of
highly-paid foreigners. What should we say of
ourselves in England if a stranger could point
to all the cotton mills in Lancashire, all the flax
mills of Leeds, Dundee, and Ireland, and all the
iron and engineering shops of Glasgow, London,
and Liverpool, and say these were all managed
and superintended by foreign skill, that the
English employed in them were mere labourers
and unskilled workmen under the dictation of
strangers who could scarcely speak the language
of the country? If to this were added the
knowledge that the people of England had to
pay two or three prices for the cotton goods,
because of a high duty and other fiscal restrictions,
preventing imports at half the price, and
that all this only served to make a few rich men
richer, while the poor people who wore the
cotton had to pay the entire cost of all the
foreign cotton wool, foreign machinery, foreign