as a people, do not yet understand the proper
use of a linen or cotton under-garment. The
moujiks, who wear shirts, are apparently
in the same state of doubt as to how
to wear them, as the Scottish highlanders
were on the subject of pantaloons after the
sumptuary laws of seventeen hundred and
forty-six. Poor Alister Macalister carried
the breeches which the ruthless Sassenach
government had forced on him, on the top of his
walking-pole. Ivan Ivanovitch wears his
shirt, when he is lucky enough to possess one,
outside his trousers, after the manner of a
surplice. The soldier thinks that the uniform
great-coat covers a multitude of sins, and
wears no shirt at all. According to the accurate
Baron de Haxthausen, the kit of every
Russian soldier ought to contain three shirts;
but theory is one thing, and practice another;
and I can state, of my own personal experience,
that I have played many games at
billiards with Russian officers even (you
can't well avoid seeing up to your opponent's
elbow at some stages of the game), and that if they
possessed shirts, they either kept them
laid up in lavender at home, or wore them
without sleeves.

The unsavoury boarders who had thus
made the Preussischer Adler their prize, very
speedily let us know that we were in a country
where a man may not, by any means, do
what he likes with his own. They guarded
the gangway, they pervaded the wheel, and
not only spoke to the man thereat, but
rendered his further presence there quite
unnecessary. They placed the funnel under strict
surveillance, and they took possession of the
whole of the baggage at one fell swoop,
attaching to each package curious little
leaden seals stuck on bits of string, and
inscribed with mysterious hieroglyphs
strongly resembling the Rabbinical cachets
which the Hebrew butchers in Whitechapel
Market append to their joints of meat. Then
a tall douanier began wandering among the
maze of chests, portmanteaus, and carpet-bags;
marking here and there a package in
abstruse and abstracted manner with a piece
of chalk, as though he were working out
mathematical problems. We were not allowed
to carry the smallest modicum of luggage on
our persons; and—as I had been incautious
enough, just before our arrival in harbour, to
detach my unlucky courier's bag from my
side, and to hold it in my hand—I was soon
unpleasantly reminded of the stringency of the
customs regulations of the port of Cronstadt.
The tall douanier pounced upon the harmless
leathern pouch quite gleefully, and, instantaneously
declaring (in chalk) on the virgin
leather that the angle A. G. was equal to the
angle G. B., added it to the heap of luggage
which then encumbered the deck. There it
lay, with the little French actress's swan-
down boa, and I am happy to state, my old enemy
—Miss Wapps's perforated air-cushion. But
Miss Wapps made the steward the wretchedest
man in Russia for about five minutes; so
fiercely did she rate him on the sequestration
of that chattel of hers.

There was a dead pause, a rather
uncomfortable status quo about this time, everybody
seemed to be waiting for the performances to
begin, and the boarding-party looked, in their
stiff, awkward immobility, like a band of
"supers" waiting the arrival of the tyrant.
Only the little creature who was nearly a
hunchback was active; for the mathematical
genius had gone to sleep, or was pretending
to sleep on a sea-chest, with his head resting
in his chalky hands. It seemed to be the
province of this diminutive but lynx-eyed
functionary to guard against the possibility
of any contraband merchandise oozing out of
the baggage after it had been sealed; and he
went peering, and poking, and turning up
bags and boxes with his grimy paws, sniffing
sagaciously meanwhile, as if he could
discover prohibited books and forged bank-
notes by scent. Captain Steffens had
mysteriously disappeared; and the official with the
silver-lace, inlaid with dirt, was nowhere to
be found. About this time, also, it occurred to
the crew—taking advantage of this forty
bars rest—to send a deputation aft, consisting
of a hairy mariner in a fur-cap, earrings,
a piebald cowskin waistcoat, a green shirt,
worsted net tights and hessians, to solicit
trinkgeld, or drink-money. On the deputation
ushering itself into my presence, with
the view above-stated, I informed it politely
and in the best German I could muster, that
I had already paid an extravagant price for
my passage, and that I would see the deputation
fried before I gave it a groschen; and,
soon after this, the stewards, probably infected
by some epidemic of extortion hovering in the
atmosphere of Russia, began to make out
fabulous bills against the passengers for
bottles of champagne they had never dreamt
of, and cups of coffee they had never
consumed. And, as none of us had any Russian
money, and every one was anxious to get rid
of his Prussian thalers and silbergroschen,
the deck was soon converted into an
animated money-market, in which some of us
lost our temper, and all of us about twenty
per cent. on the money we changed.

There was a gentleman on board of the
Hebrew persuasion—a very different
gentleman, however, from my genial friend from
Posen, or from the merchant in the cat-skins
at Stettin—who had brought with him—of
all merchandise in the world!—a consignment
of three hundred canary birds. These
little songsters had been built up into quite
a castle of cages, open at all four sides;
the hatches of the hold had been left open
during the voyage; and it was very pretty
and pastoral to hear them executing their
silvery roulades in the beautiful May evening,
and to see the Hebrew gentleman (he wore a
white hat, a yellow waistcoat, a drab coat,
light grey trousers and buff slippers, and, with