streets. Two or three main thoroughfares
had been paved with wood; the wood
pavement was burning, and looked like a fiery sea.
With fire on all sides, there was no alternative
but to rush over this, and to hurry with all
speed out of the devoted place.

The fortress of Kazan is built on an
adjacent hill; thither all the people took
refuge, carrying in chariots, and oftener upon
their backs, or in their hands, what portions
of their property they had found time to
save. The fire was not subdued for several
days; the houseless people lived in tents, and
for a time many had to endure distressing
hunger.

An average of four such fires in a century
is certainly a heavy drawback on the pleasures
of this delightful Cauldron. During the
fire, thieves went about in gangs, broke
houses open, and plundered them even before
the eyes of their distracted owners. The
liquor-shops were all captured; no spirit was
left to blaze, and crowds of drunken men and
women were to be seen roaming up and down
the burning streets, singing merry choruses.
Hundreds of such creatures lay down and
perished horribly among the flames. The
drivers of the public conveyances, the Izvostchicks,
made market of the catastrophe in
another way. For a load of goods, that they
would have removed at any other time
for fourpence, they demanded fifty to a
hundred roubles, in advance. Even then,
three out of five of these men did not
deposit the goods as they promised, on the
other bank of the Kazanka, but made oft
with them.

We have heard enough now, probably, of
this provincial capital in the dominions of the
Czar. It has not perished. The Emperor
and the imperial family subscribed munificently
towards its restoration, and from many
parts of Russia noble contributions were
received for the relief of sufferers. The rich
nobles and merchants of the place soon
rebuilt mansions, manufactories, and churches.
Kazan is now handsomer than before; but there
is still no such thing as water supply or a fireplug
in the town, and there are sundry other
little matters wanted that are almost as essential
to a civilised existence as silk stockings
and champagne. The surrounding country
was once famous for fertility; now it is a
desert. A little canal and drainage work
would make a mighty difference to Kazan;
but it is a thriving place, and what more can
be wanted, save that there should be no lack
of pleasure in it. Who talks about mortality?
What matter plague, pestilence, and famine;
fire, flood, and persecution? Let the band
strike up a polonaise; let us all trip it "up
stairs, down stairs, in my lady's chamber,"
and so back into the ball-room for a waltz.
While there are nobles with plenty of money
to lavish on themselves, and with plenty of
power to grind down their slaves, all goes
merrily as a marriage-bell; and the black
and bubbling Russian Cauldron is kept in
full boil.

AMBER WITCHERY

DURING the dreadful thirty years' war in
Germany, there lived in the island of Usedom,
on the Prussian border of the Baltic, a quiet
and simple-minded pastor named Schweidler,
with his pretty daughter Mary. The little
village of Coserow, in which they dwelt,
was sacked and ruined by the contending
armies, and the villagers escaped into
the neighbouring cliffs and hills to save
their lives. When the danger was over, they
found themselves without homes, food, or
money; and the pastor and his flock were
driven nearly to starvation. One day Mary
Schweidler went up the Streckelberg to pick
some blackberries; but soon afterwards she
ran back joyous and breathless to her father,
with two shining pieces of amber, each nearly
as large as a man's head. As soon as she could
recover breath, she told her father that, near
the shore, the wind had blown away the sand
from a vein of amber; that she straightway
broke off these pieces with a stick;
that there was an ample store of the
precious substance, and that she had covered it
over to conceal her secret.

The amber brought money, and the money
brought food, and clothing, and comfort.
But those were days when women were
tortured and burnt for witchcraft; and
it fell out that poor Mary Schweidler was
regarded as a witch. How it ended with
the pastor's daughter the reader will see in
Lady Duff Gordon's admirable translation
of Meinhold's narrative of the Amber
Witch. The unkind German critics have
lately found out that it is all a fiction, written
by Meinhold to mystify German critics of
the Strauss school; but, as a boy refuses to
believe that Robinson Crusoe is aught but fact,
so will we continue to believe that Mary
Schweidler did pick up the two fine lumps of
amber, and did undergo witch persecution.

There have been as many theories to
explain the nature and formation of amber
as if it had been veritably bewitched.
Item (as Pastor Schweidler would say):
some observers have thought it must be
of animal origin, some vegetable, some
mineral; some have maintained that it is an
animal substance similar to bees'-wax, and
secreted by a peculiar kind of ant inhabiting
pine forests; others have affirmed that it must
be a fossil mineral, of antediluvian origin; while
a third party have given their suffrage to the
theory that amber is a gum which oozes in a
liquid state out of the pine tree, and then
solidifies. These last theorists appear to be
nearer the truth than either of the others; for
the insects and flies, and bits of leaves which
are found in amber seem to show that it
must have been in a liquid, or at any rate a
viscid state when they were buried in the