and they are bariolé, or smeared over in the
most eccentric manner with alternate bars of
black and white paint. In Western Europe,
these inviting spaces would be very speedily
covered with rainbow-hued placards relating
to pills and plays and penny-newspapers, but
I should like to see the bill-sticker bold
enough to deface his Imperial Majesty's
sentry-box lamp-posts, with his sheet of double-
crown and his paste-brush! This is no place
for the famous Paddy Clark, who, being
charged before a magistrate at Bow Street,
with the offence of defacing the august walls
of Apsley House with a Reform placard,
unblushingly avowed his guilt, and added that
he would paste a bill on the Duke of
Wellington's back, if he were paid for it. I am
afraid that Mr. Clark would very soon be pasting
bills beyond the Oural Mountains for the
Siberian bears to read, if he were alive, and
in Russia; or, that, if he escaped exile, he
would swiftly discover that the Russian
police have a way of posting bills on the
backs of human houses very plain and legible
to the view. They always print, too, in red
ink. These black and white lamp-posts common,
by the way, all over Russia, and whose
simple and elegant scheme of embellishment
is extended to the verst-posts, the sentry-boxes,
and the custom-house huts at the
frontiers and town-barriers, are an emanation
from the genius of the beneficient but insane
autocrat, Paul the First; their peculiar decoration
is due to the same imperial maniac,
who issued oukases concerning shoe-strings,
cocked-hats, and ladies' muffs, and whose
useful career was prematurely cut short in a
certain frowning palace at St. Petersburg,
of which I shall have to tell by-and-by.
When I see these variegated erections, I
understand what the meaning is of the mysterious
American striped pig.* It must in justice be
admitted, that though Paul was a roaring madman
there are other countries where the
sentry-boxes, at least, are similarly smeared.
I happened, lately, to traverse the whole
breadth of the miserable kingdom of Hanover,
coming from Hamburg; and for sixty miles
the road-side walls, palings, and hedges, were
painted in stripes of black and yellow—the
national Hanoverian colours. I do not like
thee Hanover, thee, thy king, nor coinage.
The Hanoverian postmen wear a costume
seedily imitative of our General Post-Office
employés; but the scarlet is dingy and the
black cockade a most miserable mushroom.
It made me mad to see the letter-boxes, and
custom-house walls, and railway vans all
flourished over vith the royal initials G. R.

* Did my reader ever notice the curious fancy that persons
not quite right in their minds have for stripes and
chequers, or at least for parallel lines? Martin von Butchell
used to ride a striped pony. I saw a lunatic in Hanwell
sit for hours counting and playing with the railings.
Many insane persons are fascinated by a chess-board; and
any one who has ever had a brain fever will remember
the horrible attractions of a striped wall-paper

Bronze on the Nevskoï; striped sentry-
boxes on the quays; for second-rate streets,
such as the Galernaia-Oulitza, or Great Galley
Street the Podialskeskaia, or Street of the
Barbers, more economical lamp-posts are
provided, being simply great gibbets of rough
wood, to which oil-lamps are hung in chains,
There are other streets more remote from
the centre of civilisation, or Nevskoï, which
are obliged to be contented with ropes slung
across from house to house, with an oil-lamp
dangling in the middle (the old Reverbère
plan); and there are a great many outlying
streets which do without lamps all the year
round. But oil, or gas, or neither, all the
posts in Petersburg are lampless from the
first of May to the first of August in every
year. During those three months there is,
meteorologically and officially, no night. It
sometimes happens, as in this summer last
past, that the days draw in much earlier than
usual. Towards the end of last July, it was
pitch-dark at eight o'clock, p. m. The government
of the Double Eagle, however, does not
condescend to notice these aberrations on the
part of the clerk of the weather. The
government night, as duly stamped and
registered, and sanctified by Imperial oukases,
does not commence till nine p. m. on the first
of August; and then, but not a day or hour
before, the lamps are lighted. To me, the
first sign of gas in the Nevskoï, after returning
from a weary journey, was a beacon of
hope and cheerfulness; but the Russians
welcome the gas back with dolorous faces and
half-suppressed sighs. Gas is the precursor
of the sleety, rainy, sopping autumn, with
its fierce gusts of west wind; gas is the
herald, the avant-courier, of the awful
winter: of oven-like rooms, nose-biting outward
temperature, frozen fish, frozen meat, frozen
tears, frozen everything. Some Russians will
tell you that the winter is the only time to
enjoy St. Petersburg. Then there are balls,
then Montagnes de Glace, then masquerades,
then the Italian opera, then sleighing parties,
then champagne suppers. With warm rooms
and plenty of furs, who need mind the winter?
But give a Russian a chance of leaving
Russia, and see to whom he will give the
preference—to the meanest mountebank at