some woods and forests in the Home Park,
Windsor; and that a dwarfish gentleman,
by the name of Rumpelstiltskin, had lately
had an audience of her most gracious Majesty,
and boldly demanded the last of the royal
babies as a reward for his services in cutting
the Koh-i-noor diamond? Who would not
forego a Guildhall banquet for the pleasure
of a genuine Barmecide feast? who would
not take an express train to Wantley, if he
could be certain that the real original dragon,
who swallowed up the churches, and the
cows, and the people, was to be seen alive
there? When I was a little lad, the maps
were my story-books. The big marble-paper
covered atlas, only to be thumbed on high
days and holidays, had greater charms for me
than even Fox's Martyrs or the Seven
Champions. With this atlas and a paunchy
volume with a piecrust cover (was it Brookes'
or Maunder's gazetteer?) what romances I
wove, what poems I imagined, what castles
in the air I built! What household words
I made of foreign cities; what subtle
knowledge I had of the three Arabias,—Arabia
Petra, Arabia Deserta, and Arabia Felix!
How I longed for the time when I should
be big enough to go to Spain (shall I ever
be big enough to make that journey, I
wonder?)—what doughty projects I formed
against the day when I should be enabled to
travel on an elephant in Bengal, and a reindeer
in Lapland, and a mule in the Pyrenees,
and an ostrich in Kabylia, and a
crocodile in Nubia, like Mr. Waterton. But
my special storybook was that vast patch
on the map of Europe marked Russia. In
Europe, quotha! did not Russia stretch far,
far into Asia, and farther still into America?
I never was satiated with this part of the
atlas. There was perpetual winter in Russia,
of course. The only means of travelling was
on a sledge across the snowy steppes.
Packs of wolves invariably followed in
pursuit, howling fearfully for prey. The traveller
was always provided with a stock of live
babies, whom he loved dearer than life itself,
but whom he threw out, nevertheless, to the
wolves one by one, at half-mile distance or
so. Then he threw out his lovely and
attached wife (at her own earnest request, I
need not say), and then the wolves, intent
on a third course, leaped into the sledge, and
made an end of him. It used to puzzle me
considerably as to how the horses escaped
being eaten in the commencement, for the
sledge always kept going at a tremendous
rate; and I was always in a state of ludicrous
uncertainty as to the steppes—what
they were made of,—wood, or stone, or turf;
whether children ever sat on them, with
babies in their arms (but the wolves would
never have allowed that, surely!); and how
many steppes went to a flight. There was
attraction enough to me, goodness knows, in
the rest of the atlas; in boot-shaped Italy, in
Africa, huge and yellow as a pumpkin, and
like that esculent, little excavated; in the
Red Sea (why did they always colour it
pea-green in the map?); but the vasty Russia
with its appurtenances, was my great
storehouse of romance. The Baltic was a
continual wonder to me. How could ships ever
get into it when there were the Great and
Little Belts, and the Kraken, and the
Maelstrom, and the icebergs, and the polar bears
to stop the way. Russia (on the map) was
one vast and delightful region of mysteries,
and adventures, and perilous expeditions; a
glorious wonder-land of czars who lived in
wooden houses disguised as shipwrights; of
Cossacks continually careering on long-maned
ponies, and with lances like Maypoles; of
grisly bears, sweet-smelling leather, ducks,
wolves, palaces of ice, forests, steppes, frozen
lakes, caftans, long beards, Kremlins, and
Ivan the Terribles. Never mind the knout;
never mind the perpetual winter; never
mind the passage of the Beresina,—I put
Russia down in my juvenile itinerary as a
place to be visited, coûte qui coûte, as soon
as I was twenty-one. I remember, when I
was about half that age, travelling on the top
of an omnibus from Mile End to the Bank
with a philosophic individual in a red plaid
cloak. He told me he had lived ten years in
Russia (Rooshia, he pronounced it), and gave
me to understand confidentially that the
czar ruled his subjects with a rod of iron.
I grieved when he departed, though his
conversation was but common-place. I
followed him half-way up Cornhill, gazing at
the red plaid skirts of his cloak flapping in
the breeze, and revering him as one who had
had vast and wonderful experiences—as a
Sindbad the Sailor, multiplied by Marco
Polo. O, for my twenty-first birthday, and
my aunt's legacy, and hey for Russia!

The birthday and the legacy came and
departed—never to return again. I received
sentence of imprisonment within three
hundred miles of London, accompanied by hard
labour for the term of my natural life; and
though I was far from forgetting Russia—
though a poor Silvio Pellico of a paper stainer—
I still cherished, in a secret corner of my heart,
a wild plan of escaping from the Speilberg
some day, and travelling to my heart's
content. Russia faded by degrees into the
complexion of a story-book, to be believed in,
furtively, but against reason and against
hope. And this dreamy, legendary, state
of feeling was not a little encouraged by
the extraordinary paucity of fact, and the
astonishing abundance of fiction to be found
in all books I could obtain about Russia. Every
traveller seemed to form a conception of the
country and people more monstrous and
unveracious than his predecessor; and I really
think that, but for the war, and the Prisoners
at Lewes and the Times Correspondent, I
should have ended by acceding to the
persuasion that Russia was none other than
the Empire of Cockaigne, and the Emperor