have crossed St. George's Channel to Dublin,
or the Grampians to Edinburgh, will remember
the striking contrast between the cabman
you left in London and the Irish car-driver
who rattled you up Westmoreland Street, or
the canny Jehu who conveyed you in a cab
to your hotel in the Scottish metropolis.
Take but a jaunt of half a dozen miles by
rail out of London, and you will scarcely
fail to remark the difference between
Number nine hundred and nine from the
Wellington Street stand, and the driver of the fly
from the Queen's Arms, or the Terminus
Hotel. They are quite different types of
coachmanhood. But in Russia, the Ischvostchik
who drives you from the Admiralty at
St. Petersburg to the Moscow railway station
is, to a hair of his beard, to a plait in his
caftan, to a sneezing penultimate in his
rapid Russ, the very counterpart, the own
Corsican brother, of the Ischvostchik who
drives you from the terminus to the Bridge
of the Marshals in Holy Moscow, four
hundred and fifty miles away. Stay: there is
one difference in costume. The Petersburg
Ischvostchik wears a peculiar low-crowned
hat, with a broad brim turned up liberally at
the sides; whereas, the Moscow cabby, more
particularly, affects a Tom and Jerry hat
with the brim pared closely off, and encircled
by a ribbon and three or four buckles—a hat
that has some remote resemblance to the
genuine Connaught bogtrotter's head covering.
Du reste, both styles of hat are common,
and indifferently worn by the moujiks all
over Russia, only the low-crowned hat
being covered with a silk nap, and in some
cases with beaver, is the more expensive,
and is, therefore, in more general use in
Petersburg the luxurious. Don't believe
those, therefore, who endeavour to persuade
you of the non-Russianism of St. Petersburg.
There is a great deal of eau de cologne
consumed there; the commerce in white kid
gloves is enormous; and there is a thriving
trade in wax candles, pineapple ices,
patent leather boots, Clicquot's champagne,
crinoline petticoats, artificial flowers, and
other adjuncts to civilisation. Grisi and
Lablache sing at the Grand Opera; Mademoiselle
Cerito dances there; French is habitually
spoken in society; and invitations to balls and
dinners are sent to you on enamelled cards, and
in pink billets smelling of musk and millefleurs;
but your Distinguished Origin may come
away from the Afghan ambassador's ball, or
the Grand Opera, or the Princess Liagouschkoff's
tableaux vivans, your head full of
Casta Diva, the Valse à deux temps, and the
delightful forwardness of Russian civilisation;
and your Origin will hail an Ischvostchik to
convey you to your domicile; and right
before you, almost touching you, astride on
the splashboard, will sit a genuine right-
down child of Holy Russia, who is (it is no
use mincing the matter) an ignorant, beastly,
drunken, idolatrous savage, who is able to
drive a horse, and to rob, and no more. Woe
to those who wear the white kid gloves, and
serenely allow the savage to go on in his
dirt, in his drunkenness, in his most pitiable
joss-worship (it is not religion) in his swinish
ignorance, not only (it were vain to dwell
upon that) of letters, but of things that the
very dumb dogs and necessary cats in Christian
households seem to know instinctively!
Woe to the drinkers of champagne when
the day shall come for these wretched
creatures to grow raving mad instead of sillily
maudlin on the vitriol brandy, whose
monopoly brings in a yearly revenue of fifty
millions of roubles (eight millions sterling) to
the paternal government, and when the
paternal stick shall avail no more as a
panacea. I know nothing more striking in
my Russian experience than the sudden
plunge from a hothouse of refinement to a
cold bath of sheer barbarism. It is as if
you left a presidential levée in the White
House at Washington, and fell suddenly into
an ambuscade of Red Indians. Your civilisation,
your evening dress, your carefully
selected stock of pure Parisian French, avail
you nothing with the Ischvostchik. He
speaks nothing but Russ; he cannot read; he
has nothing, nothing in common with you—
closely shaven (as regards the cheeks and
chin) and swathed in the tight sables of
European etiquette, as you are—he in his
flowing oriental caftan, and oriental beard,
and more than oriental dirt.

It is possible, nay a thing of very common
occurrence, for a foreigner to live half a dozen
years in Russia without mastering the Russian
alphabet, or being called upon to say
"How do you do?" or "Good-night!" in
Russ. Many of the highest Russian nobles
are said indeed to speak their own language
with anything but fluency and correctness.
But, unless you want to go afoot in the
streets (which in any Russian town is about
equivalent to making a pilgrimage to the
Holy House at Loretto with unboiled peas
in your shoes), it is absolutely necessary for
you to acquire what I may call the Ischvostchik
language, in order to let your conductor
know your intended destination. The
language is neither a very difficult, nor a very
copious one. For all locomotive purposes it
may be resumed into the following ten
phrases.

1. Na prava—To the right.
2. Na leva—To the left.
3. Pouyiama—Straighten. Right a-head.
4. Stoï—Stop!
5. Pashol-Scorrei—Quick, go a-head.
6. Shivai—Faster.
7. Dam na Vodka—I'll stand something
to drink above the fare.
8. Durak—Fool!
9. Sabakoutchelovek—Son of a dog!
10. Tippian—You're drunk.

These phrases are spelt anyhow. The
Ischvostchik language being a Lingua non scripta,