the trunks. Finding me indisposed for
conversation (I had taken some genuine Russian
caviare for breakfast with a view of acclimatising
myself early, and was dreadfully sick),
he took himself and umbrella off to another
apartment, and the boots expressed his
opinion to me (in strict confidence) that he,
the commissionnaire, was a spitzbube. This
is all he has done for me, and now he has the
conscience to come to me and tell me that his
charges are "chost von Daler." He is authorised,
it appears, by somebody who does
not pay the thalers himself, to extort them
from other people; and he points, with
conscious pride, to some tarnished buttons
on his waistcoat on which the Russian eagle
is manifest.

Why do I give the commissionnaire the
thaler he demands, and to which he has no
sort of right? Why do I feel inclined to
give two, three dollars, to invite him to
partake of schnapps, to cast myself on his
neck, and assure him that I love him as a
brother? Why, because to-day is Saturday,
the seventeenth of May, eleven o'clock
in the forenoon, and I am standing on
the deck—the quarter deck, ye gods!—
of the Preussicher Adler which good
pyroscaphe has got her steam up to a
maddening extent, and in another hour's time
will leave the harbour of Stettin for
Cronstadt.

New tail-feathers, new wing-feathers, new
beak, new claws, has the Preussicher Adler. A
brave bird. There is nothing the matter
with her boilers now, her masts are tapering,
her decks snow-white, and I have no doubt
that her copper glistens like burnished gold,
and that the mermaids in the Baltic will be
tempted to purloin little bits of the shining
metal to deck their weedy tresses withal. A
bran new flag of creamy tinge floats at her
stern, and on it is depicted with smart
plumage, and beak and claws of gold, an eagle of
gigantic dimensions. And this is the last
eagle with one head that I shall see on this
side Jordan.

Everything seems to be new on board. The
saloon is gorgeous in crimson velvet, and
mirrors, and mahogany and gold. There
are the cleanest of sheets, the rosiest of
counterpanes, the most coquettish of chintz
curtains to the berths. All the crockery is
new. All the knives and forks are new;
and though I discover afterwards that they
won't cut, they are delightfully shiny.
There is a library of new books in a
new rosewood case, and there is a new
cabinet piano, tuned up to nautical-concert
pitch, and whose keys when struck clang
as sharply as the tongue of an American
steamboat clerk. The stewards, of whom
there are a goodly number, are all clad in
glossy new uniforms of a fancy naval cut, and
look like midshipmen at a Vauxhall
masquerade. There is a spacious galley for
cooking purposes, full of the brightest cooking
utensils; a titillating odour issues therefrom,
and there are four cooks, yea four,
all in professional white. One has an
imperial and gold watch-chain, one is flirting
with the stewardess (who is young, pretty,
flounced, and wears her hair after the manner
of the Empress Eugénie), a third is smoking a
paper cigarette (quite the gentleman) while
the last, reclining in a grove of stewpans, is
studying attentively a handsomely bound
book. What can it be? Newton's Principia,
Victor Hugo's Contemplations, the Cuisinier
Royal, or the Polite Letterwriter? The
Preussicher Adler, be it known, like her sister
vessel the Vladimir, is an intensely aristocratic
boat. Both are commanded by officers
respectively of the Prussian (!) and
Russian (!!) navies. The fare by the Prussian
Eagle is enormously high; nine guineas for a
sixty hours' passage. On payment of this
exorbitant honorarium she will carry such
humble passengers as myself; but the
ordinary travellers per Preussicher Adler are
princes of the empire, grand dukes, arch-
electors, general-lieutenants, ambassadors,
senators, councillors of state. And as for
ladies—tenez!—the best edition of Almack's
Revisited is to be found on board a Stettin
steamboat. I start at the wrong end of the
season to travel with the grandees, however.
For this being the commencement of the
navigation and of PEACE besides, the Russian
aristocracy are all hurrying away from St.
Petersburgh as fast as ever they can obtain
passports. The Vladimir, they tell me, has
all her berths engaged up to the middle of
July next, and the Prussian Eagle is in equal
demand.

I should perhaps be more unexceptionably
satisfied with the Adler's arrangements, if her
crew would not persist in wearing
moustaches and hessian boots with the tassels cut
off. It is not nautical. A boatswain, too,
with stripes down his trousers, is to me an
anomaly. I must dissent, too, from the system
of stowing passengers' luggage per Preussicher
Adler. The manner of it appears to be this:
a stalwart porter balancing a heavy trunk on
his shoulder advances along the plank which
leads from the wharf to the ship's side. He
advances jauntily, as though he were not
unaccustomed to dance a coranto. Arrived
at the brink of the abyss, he stops,
expectorates, bandies a joke in High Dutch
with a compatriot who is mending his
trousers in an adjacent barge, and bending
slightly, pitches the trunk head foremost into
the hold.

There is, I need scarcely say, a tremendous
fuss and to-do with papers and policemen
before we start, calling over names, verification
or legitimitation of passports, as it is
called by the Russian consul, et cetera et
cetera; but I will say this, in honour of the
Preussicher Adler's punctuality, that as the
clock strikes noon we cast off from our moorings,
and steam away through the narrow