stand me in good stead for commentaries
when (in the week of the three Thursdays, I
suppose) I take heart of grace and sit down
to study the giant of Weimar's masterpiece
in the original. There was a pretty, blue-
eyed, rosy-lipped Marguérite, whose hair had
a golden sheen perfectly wondrous; and
Faust would have been a senseless stock not
to have fallen in love with her; but, alas!
she was too fat, and looked as if she ate too
much; and when she wept for Faust gave
me far more the impression that she was
crying because, like the ebony patriarch
Tucker, familiarly hight Dan, she was too
late for her supper. Still, I came away from
Faust almost happy.

There might, perchance, at other times be a
surly pleasure in the discovery that Berlin
gloves are apparently unknown at Berlin—
even as there are no French rolls in Paris—
and that Berlin wool is very little sought
after. There might have been some advantage
gained to science by an attempt to
analyse the peculiar smell of the capital of
Prussia, which, to uninitiated noses, seems
compounded of volatile essence of Cologne
(not the eau, but the streets thereof) multiplied
by sewer, plus cesspool, plus Grande
Rue de Pera, plus Rue de la Tixeranderie
after a shower of rain, plus port of Marseilles
at any time, plus London eating-house, plus
Vauxhall bone-boiling establishment, plus
tallow factory, plus low lodging-house in
Whitechapel, plus dissecting-rooms, plus the
"gruel thick and slab" of Macbeth's witches
when it began to cool. There might have
been a temporary relief in expatiating on the
geological curiosities of Berlin, the foot-
lacerating pavement, and the Sahara-like
sandy plain in which the city is situate.
There might have been a temporary excitement,
disagreeable but salubrious, in losing,
as I did, half my store of Prussian notes in a
cab, and cooling my heels for three successive
days at the Police Præsidium in frantically-
fruitless inquiries (in very scanty German)
after rny departed treasure—but there wasn't;
no, not one atom. Though the Hôtel de
Russie boasted as savoury a table-d'hôte as
one would wish to find, likewise Rhine wine
exhilarating to the palate and soothing to the
soul, I began to loathe my food and drink.
I longed for Russian caviare and Russian
vodki. I came abroad to eat candles and
drink train-oil—or, at least, the equivalent
for that which is popularly supposed to form
the favourite food of our late enemies—and
not to feast on Bisque soup and suprême de
volaille. Three weeks! they seemed an
eternity.

The maestro whom I met at Potsdam,
went back to Cologne cheerfully; he was
not bound for the land of the Russ; and,
having accomplished the object of his mission
—which I imagine to have been the engagement
of a few hundred fiddlers—departed in
a droschky, his straw-coloured kids gleaming
in the sunshine, and wishing me joy of my
journey to St. Petersburg. Shall I ever get
there, I wonder? The Englishman who was
a man of the world didn't come back. He of
the red head (Mr. Eddystone I christened
him from his beacon-like hair) took rail for
Königsberg, to see if there was anything
in the steam-vessel line to be done there,
and the buff waistcoat, who was commercially
interested in tallow, boldly
announced his determination not to stand it
any longer, but to be off to St. Petersburg
overland.

Overland! and why could not I also go
overland? The railway, I reasoned, will
thence, as far as this same Königsberg, and
taking me by way of Tilsit, Tauroggen, Mittau,
Riga, and Lake Tschudi, I can reach the
much-desired Petropolis. There is the malle-
poste or diligence; there is the extra-post;
there is the private kibitka, which I can
purchase, or hire, and horse at my own charges
from stage to stage. The journey ought to
occupy ABOUT six days. ABOUT! but a wary
and bronzed queen's messenger, who
converses with me (he ought to know something,
for he is on the half-pay of the dragoons, is a
lord's nephew, spent fifty thousand pounds
before he was five-and-twenty, and is now
ceaselessly wandering up and down on the
face of the earth with a red despatch-box,
six hundred a-year, and his expenses paid)—
the queen's messenger, bronzed and wary,
shakes his head ominously. When the winter
breaks up in Russia, he remarks, the roads
break up too, and the travellers break down.
He has often been overland himself (where
hasn't he been?) perforce in winter; and he
has such marrow-freezing stories to tell (all
in a cool, jaunty, mess-room-softened-by-
experience manner), of incessant travelling
by day and night, of roads made up of
morasses, sand-hills, and deep gullies, of
drunken drivers, of infamous post-houses
swarming with all the plagues of Egypt,
naturalised Russian subjects; of atrociously
extortionate Jew postmasters; of horses—
rum ones to look at, and rummer, or worse
ones, to go; of frequent stoppages for hours
together; of an absolute dearth of anything
wholesome to eat or drink, save bread and
tea. He enlarges so much on the bruisings,
bumpings, joltings, and dislocations to which
the unfortunate victim of the nominally six,
but more frequently twelve days' overland
route is subject, that I bid the project avaunt
like an ugly phantom, and, laying it in
the Baltic Sea, determine to weather out
the time as well as I can, till the
seventeenth.

I can't stop any longer in Berlin,
however, that is certain. So I drive out of the
Oraneinberg Gate, and cast myself into a
railway carriage, which, in its turn, casts
me out at Stettin-on-the-Oder, eighty-four
miles distant. And on the banks of that
fearsome River Oder I pass May-day. In