mean that the Russian speaks English like
an Englishman, and French like a Frenchman,
without hesitation, accent, or foreign
idiom. He is versed in the literature of both
countries, and talks of Sam Weller and
Jerome Paturot with equal facility. I am,
perhaps, not so well qualified to judge of his
proficiency in Italian; but he seems to speak
that tongue with at least the same degree of
fluency as he converses in German, of which,
according to Captain Steffens, he is a master.
He laughs when I talk about the special and
astounding gift that his countrymen seem to
possess for the acquisition of languages.
"Gift, my dear fellow," he says, "it is
nothing of the kind. I certainly picked up
Italian in six months, during a residence in
the country; but I could speak French,
English, and German long before I could
speak Russian. Nous autres gentilhommes
Russes, we have English nurses; we have
French and Swiss governesses; we have
German professors at college. As children
and as adults we often pass days and weeks
without hearing a word of Russian; and the
language with which we have the slightest
acquaintance is our own." The Russian and I
soon grow to be great (travelling) friends.
He talks, and seems to be well informed, on
everybody and everything, and speaks about
government and dynasties in precisely the
same tone of easy persiflage in which he
discusses the Italian opera and the ballet.
He tells me a great deal about the Greek
church; but it is easy to see that matters
ecclesiastical don't trouble "nous autres
gentilhommes Russes" much. He has been in
the army, like the vast majority of his order,
and is learned in horses, dogs, and general
sportsmanship; a branch of knowledge that
clashes strangely with his grassailléing
Parisian accent. He proposes écarté in an
interval of chat; but finding that I am but a
poor cardplayer, he shows me a few tricks on
the cards sufficient to set a moderately
ambitious wizard up in business on the spot,
and contentedly relinquishes the pack for the
pianoforte, on which he executes such
brilliant voluntaries, that I can see the
hard-favoured visage of Miss Wapps gazing down
at us through the saloon skylight in
discontented admiration—that decisive lady
marvelling doubtless how such an accomplished
Russian can condescend to waste his
time and talents on such a trumpery mortal
as I am. He shows me an album bound in
green velvet, and with his cypher and coronet
embroidered in rubies thereupon, and filled
with drawings of his own execution. He
rolls paper cigarettes with the dexterity of a
Castilian caballero; and he has the most
varied and exact statistical knowledge on all
sorts of topics, political, social, agricultural,
and literary, of any man I ever met with.
And this is, believe me, as ordinary and
everyday-to-be-found specimen of the
Russian gentleman as the unlettered,
unlicked, uncouth, untravelled John Smith
one meets at a Boulogne boarding-house is of
an English esquire. My friend, the Russian,
has his little peculiarities; without being in
the slightest degree grave or sententious
that facile mouth of his is never curved into
a genuine smile; those dark grey eyes of his
never look you in the face; he seems never
tired of drinking champagne, and never in
the least flushed thereby; and, finally and
above all, I never hear him express an
opinion that any human thing is right or
wrong. If he has an opinion on any
subject, and he converses on almost all topics,
it is not on board the Preussischer Adler, or
to me, that he will impart it. With his handsome
face and graceful carriage, and varied
parts, this is the sort of man whom nine
women out of ten would fall desperately in
love with at first sight; yet he drops a witty
anecdote or so about the sex, that makes
me start and say, Heaven help the woman
who ever falls in love with him!

It may have struck my reader, that beyond
alluding to the bare fact of being on the
Baltic, and in a fair way for Cronstadt, I
have said little or nothing as yet concerning
our actual voyage. In the first place, there
is but little marine to be chronicled; for
from Saturday at noon, when we started, to
this present Monday evening we have had
uninterrupted fair weather and smooth water;
and are gliding along as on a lake. And, in
the second place, I generally shy the sea as
much as I can. I hate it. I have a dread
for it as Mrs. Hemans had. To me it is
simply a monster, cruel, capricious, remorseless,
rapacious, insatiable, deceitful; sullenly
unwilling to disgorge its treasures; mockingly
refusing to give up its dead. But it must,
and shall, some day: the sea. If anything
could reconcile me, however, to that baseless
highway, it would be the days and nights we
have had since Saturday. It is never dark,
and the moon, beautiful as she is, is almost
an intruder, so long does the sun lord it over
the heavens, so short are his slumbers (it is
not far from the time and place where he
rises at midnight*), so gloriously strong and
fresh does he come up to his work again
in the morning. And the white ships that
glide on the tranquil sea, far far away towards
the immensity of the horizon, are as augurs of
peace and hope to me; and the very smoke
from the boat's funnel that was black and
choky at Stettin, is now, in the undying sun,
all gorgeous in purple and orange as it rolls
forth in clouds that wander purposely
through the empty sky, till the sea-birds
meet them, and break them into fragments
with their sharp-sected wings.
* At Tornea, in Sweden, on the twenty-first of June.

There is a very merry party forward, in
the second cabin. Among them is a humorous
character from the south of France, who is
going to Russia to superintend a sugar