think that Petersen benefited by this transaction
considerably.

All at once there was a cry from the
passengers above, of "Isaacs! Isaacs!" and,
leaving Petersen still wolfing my beefsteak,
I hastened on deck. We had entered long
since the canal of the broad, shallow, false,
shining, silvery, Neva, in which the only
navigable channel was marked out by flags.
We had left on our right hand the palaces of
Oranienbaum and Petergoff, and now we saw
right ahead, flashing in the sun like the orb
of a king, the burnished dome of the great
cathedral of St. Izak. Then the vast work-
shops and ship-building yards of Mr. Baird;
then immense tallow warehouses (looking
like forts again), and then, starting up on
every side, not by twos or threes, but by
scores, and starting up, as if by magic, the
golden spires and domes of Petersburg!

I say starting up: it is the only word.
Some half-dozen years ago I was silly enough
to go up in a balloon, which, bursting at the
altitude of a mile, sent its passengers down
again. We fell over Fulham; and I shall
never forget the agonising distinctness with
which houses, chimneys, churches seemed
rushing up to us instead of we coming down
to them. I specially remember Fuiham church
steeple, on which I expected every moment
to be transfixed. Now, though the plane was
horizontal, not vertical, the effect was exactly
similar; and, as if from the bosom of the
Neva, the churches and palaces started up.

We went, straight as an arrow from a
Tartar's bow, into the very heart of the city.
No suburbs, no streets gradually growing
upon you, no buildings gradually increasing
in density. We were there; alongside the
English quay, in sight of the Custom-house
and Exchange, within a stone's throw of the
Winter Palace, hard by the colossal statue of
Peter the Great, nearly opposite the senate
and the Saint Synode, close to the ministry
of war, within view of the Admiralty, and
under the guns of the fortress, before you
could say Jack Robinson.

The English quay? Could this be Russia?
Palaces, villas, Corinthian columns, elegantly
dressed ladies with parasols and lapdogs, and
children gazing at us from the quay, handsome
equipages, curvetting cavaliers, and the
notes of a military band floating on the air.
Yes: this was Russia; and England was
fifteen hundred real, and fifteen thousand
moral, miles off.

The handsome granite quays and elegantly
dressed ladies were not for us to walk on or
with just yet. A double line of police sentries
extended from a little pavilion in which
we landed to a low whitewashed archway on
the other side of the quay, from which a
flight of stone steps led apparently into a
range of cellars. Walking, tired and dusty,
through this lane of stern policemen (Liberty
and the ladies peeping at us over the
shoulders of the polizeis) I could not resist an odd
feeling that I had come in the van from the
house of detention at Cronstadt to the county
gaol at Petersburg, and that I was down for
three months, with hard labour; the last
week solitary. Curiously enough, at balls,
soirées, and suppers, at St. Petersburg, at
Moscow, in town and country, I could never
divest myself of that county-gaol feeling till I
got my discharge at Cronstadt again, three
months afterwards.

A DULL DAY ON EXMOOR.

Mr. ALBERT SMITH, in the course of his
entertainment at Egyptian Hall, is accustomed
to preface that admirable monologue of
the Engineer of the Austrian Lloyd's, with
this remark, "He told me the stupidest story
that I ever heard in all my life, and now,
ladies and gentlemen, I am going to tell it to
you." Thus I, having passed through and
mercifully got out of Thursday, the twenty-
eighth day of August—the dullest day by far
in the white annals of my summer life—am
about to communicate that experience.

The companions of my misfortune were two:
Lieutenant Kidd Shinar, of Her Majesty's
Foot, and Olive Thompson, Esquire, of the
Honourable Society of the Middle Temple,
and, by practice, an amateur painter of landscapes.
The place where we three were then
and are now residing is eminently congenial to
all delineators of scenery. Upon the red rocks
by the sea, on little islands in the wooded
streams, and upon the sides of our purple
hills, there are pitched countless tents, under
the shelter of which the purveyors to the
water-colour exhibitions are seen during this
season at their pleasant toil. When they
are not thus actively employed under
canvas, they saunter loosely about the
village in intellectual gin-punch-and-
Shelley-looking groups, with short pipes, flannel
shirts, sketch-book, and moustachios. Our
young ladies peep from under their slouch
hats as they go by, upon the deathless works
of these distinguished youths with admiration,
and "Oh! I should dearly love to be a
painter's wife!" they confess at nightly toilettes
to their bosom friends. The parents of
these young people, however, entertain very
views upon this subject, and regard
our artists, as a general rule, as a less
respectable order of painters and glaziers.

Nothing but desperate ennui could
have made brothers of Olive Thompson,
Kidd Shinar, and me. We had
each sat at our separate table in the Hotel
Coffee Room for eleven days running—if I
may apply that word to days that crawled—
quite unconscious, at is seemed, of each
other's existences. When the newspaper
was laid down by Thompson, about four feet
from where I was, I would ring the bell to
inquire of the waiter whether anybody was
using the Times. When I had done sending
my fourth letter to people I did not care a