Yassy; many of the carts are missing too.
"Woe is me!" says the chief butler, and beats
his breast. He is a sly, podgy man; but his
decorous robe and his grave beard entirely
preserve him from looking comic. It is
remarked that for some days after this, whenever
he is wanted, he is found chuckling in
corners and in spirit cellars with the pedlar, and
that he is constantly drunk; but he takes
sedulous care never to recover his cheerfulness
in the presence of his mistress till the transaction
about the corn is beginning to fade from
her memory.

His story, unaccountable as it is,
inadequately represents the true state of the case.
Except a few damp, mouldy, shrunken bags
made of matting in one of the carts, he has
brought back no visible seed-corn at all. At
this crisis, however, the pedlar, who has
suddenly become a warm friend and adviser of
the perplexed household, is ready with a
remedy. He knows a Greek mercantile house
who will supply seed-corn under an arrangement
that he will undertake to make, if his
travelling expenses are paid to Nicolaiev, and if
a small commission is added for his trouble.

The chief butler, who possesses the prince's
authority to sign agreements in his name, must
go too; and they will start at once. "But there is
no money," says the princess, ruefully. "How am
I to pay your commission?" "Ah!" says the chief
butler, "the saints will give that." Let the
princess only be happy, and this jewel of a chief
butler will persuade this pearl of a pedlar to
induce the benevolent Greek mercantile firm to
take an order on next year's corn, and pay any
money that may be presently required. The
pedlar crosses his hands over his breast, and then
bows very low, hat in hand. He also takes
occasion to edge in a little request of his own.
He has got a friend, a poor, honest man, who
has been taken up by mistake, for passing forged
bank-notes. He is a very poor man with a
large family; and therefore the pedlar hopes
that the princess will write to her august
husband and get him a pardon. She will, and
does it.

All this being duly promised and settled, the
pedlar disappears for some days, and then, in a
string of carts that reaches from the lady's
lodgings to the furthest barn, comes the seed-
corn at last. There is enough to sow some
sixty thousand acres, packed in strong showerproof
sacks full to bursting. Here is corn,
indeed, and the pedlar, who heads the
procession, staff in hand, once more bares his head
and bows himself to the earth, as a good man
who has done unexpected service more than
well: as the servant may have bent himself
before Abraham when he had returned from the
city of Nahor.

What strikes my princess as rather curious,
however, is that these lusty corn-sacks are all
marked with the well-remembered cypher and
coronet of her old admirer. One sleepy Wallack,
too, who seems to be in charge of the carts,
goes down on his knees in the mud and takes a
letter out of the breast of his sheepskin; but he
is hustled away with blows by the pedlar for
presuming to address the illustrious lady, so she can
make nothing of it. Years afterwards—for
intercourse among distant friends is rare in Russia—
she will learn that the first corn got from her old
friend was sold by the chief butler and the
pedlar at Yassy. The second supply was
obtained by a specious story that her husband was
dead; and the journey to Nicolaiev, the
benevolent mercantile firm, and all the rest of the
narratives related to her, represent an ingenious
fiction which her husband will be the first to
laugh at when he hears of it. However, here
is the seed-corn now, and although the season
is very far advanced, it may still be sown with
some chance of its coming up. Perhaps a fifth
or a tenth of it really is sown; perhaps a little
more, perhaps a little less, no great difference
either way. In any case, there will be enough
to meet the assignments made in the prince's
name to the pedlar's correspondent at Nicolaiev,
for he himself transferred them before the ink
on the signatures was dry. So the first scene
of this comedy closes, with a few peasants, men
and women, hired at wages of about two shillings
a day each, straggling away over the fields to
sow the wheat. The pedlar, who farms their
labour, follows them with a barrel of vodki, to
coax out of them whatever they may have
earned or stolen from any one else. But it is
to be especially noted that he does not dispense
the vodki himself, he merely looks on while
another man does it. The pedlar, indeed, never
does anything himself. He is merely present
at the business. So many a dishonest hatful
of the seed-corn returns to the vodki waggon,
and is sold and resold a dozen times before it
is used in any other way.

       OLD STORIES RE-TOLD.

       MUTINIES IN THE NAVY.

THE year after Lord Bridport's victory over
the French, great and just discontent prevailed
among the sailors of our fleet. Lord Chatham
seems to have been a blundering First Lord, and
his successor, Lord Spencer, a mischievous
one.

As early as 1794, the seamen had had many
grievous causes of complaint. They were treated
rather as oxen penned up for the butcher than
as human beings, with hearts to feel, and brains
to resent, injustice. That terrible old Tartar,
Lord St. Vincent, had once kept our fleet at sea,
blockading Brest, for one hundred and three days.
Long after this, Nelson watched off Toulon for
thirty months, only going on shore, in that
period, three times—an hour each time. These
tedious blockades, so ruinous to ships and so
exhausting to sailors, who, perhaps, half the
time, had scanty provisions and insufficient
sleep, were strongly disapproved of by Lord
Howe, and afterwards by Lord Nelson.

Another cause of complaint in the navy was
the capricious and purposeless transfer of
crews from one vessel to another. Lord Nelson,
at a later date, protested strongly against