a wooden theatre in Naples, or to Mademoiselle
Bosio at the Balschoï-Theater here. The
Russians have about the same liking for their
winter as for their government. Both are
very splendid; but it is uncommonly hard
lines to bear either; and distance (the greater
the better) lends wonderful enchantment to
the view both of the frozen Neva and the
frozen despotism.

A few of the great shops on the Nevskoï
and the Morskaïas have an economical supply
of gas-lamps, and there is a restaurant or two
so lighted. Oil and camphine are, however,
the rule, and both are extremely cheap;
while, on the other hand, gas is—not so much
from the scarcity of coal, but from the
enormous expense of its transit—a very dear
article of consumption. Some of the second-
class shops have oil-lamps; with polished tin
reflectors; but in the humbler underground
chandlery shops, or lavkas, I have frequently
found the only illumination to consist of a
blazing pine torch, or a junk of well-tarred
cable, stuck in a sconce. Rude, or altogether
wanting in light, as these shops may be, there
is always, even in the most miserable, a dainty
lamp, frequently of silver, suspended by
slender chains before the image of the joss,
or saint.

In the year 'twenty-four, a French,
company, after an immense amount of petitioning,
intriguing, and Tchinnovnik- bribing,
obtained an authorisation from the government
to light the whole of St. Petersburg
with gas. They dug conduits into which the
water broke; they laid down pipes which the
workmen stole; they went so far as to
construct a gasometer on a very large scale
behind the cathedral of Kasan. They had
lighted some hundred yards of the Nevskoï
with gas, when a tremendous fire took place
at their premises, and the gasometer
exploded, with great havoc of life and property.
From 'twenty-four to 'thirty-nine, a period of
fifteen years, not a syllable was heard about
the formation of a new gas company. Public
opinion, for once, was stronger than bribery;
for the ignorant and superstitious populace
persisted in declaring that the destruction of
the gasometer was a judgment from Heaven
to punish the Fransouski-Labarki, the French
dogs, for erecting their new-fangled and heretical
building in the vicinage of our Lady of
Kasan's most holy temple. I don't think
that Siberia and the knout, even, would have
been very efficacious in making the moujiks
work with a will at building new premises
for the offending pipes and meters. Gas
is heretical; but the Russians are slightly
more tolerant of some other institutions
that exist to this day just behind and
all around the most holy Kasan church,
whose immediate neighbourhood enjoys an
extended reputation as being the most
infamous with respect to morality in St.
Petersburg. Strange that it should be the same
in the shadow of Westminster's twin towers,
in the shameful little dens about the Parvis
Notre Dame, in Paris; in the slums of St.
Patrick's, Dublin.

The new gas company have not done
much during the last sixteen years. In the
suburbs there is scarcely any gas; and the
gas itself is of very inferior quality—pale,
and flickering, and grudgingly dealt out. I
need not say that the lamps are placed as
high up as possible. The professional thieves
would extinguish them else, or the Russians
would steal the gas—an act of dishonesty
that, at first sight, seems impossible, but
which, when you become better acquainted
with my Sclavonic friends with the
exquisite art by which they contrive to steal
the teeth out of your head, and the flannel
jacket off your body, without your being
aware of the subtraction—will appear quite
facile and practicable. Gas in Russia!
I little thought—writing the Secrets of
the Gas in this journal three years ago,
and vainly thinking that I knew them—that
I should ever see a Russian or a Russian
gas-lamp.

The huge open places, or Ploschads, like
stony seas, into which the gaunt streets
empty themselves, are uniformly paved
with granitous stones, of which the shores
of the Gulf of Finland furnish an
inexhaustible supply. This pavement, if
arranged with some slight regularity, would be
in the early stage of progress towards tolerable
walking space; but the foundations
being utterly rotten, treacherous, and quick-
sandy, the unhappy paving- stones tumble
about in a stodge of mud and sand; and the
Ploschads are, consequently, almost
incessantly under repair. This is especially the
case in the month of April, at the time of the
general thaw. Part of the pavement sinks
down, and part is thrown up—the scoriæ of
small mud volcanoes. Thousands of moujiks
are immediately set to work, but to very little
purpose. The ground does not begin to settle
before May; and when I arrived iu St.
Petersburg, many of the streets were, for
pedestrians, absolutely impassable. The immense
parallel series of streets at Wassily-Ostrov—
Linies, as they are called—and which  are
numbered from one to sixteen, as in America,
were simply bogs, where you might
drive, or wade, or stride through on stilts,
but in which pedestrianism was a matter
of hopeless impossibility. The government,
or the municipality, or the police,
or the Czar, had caused to be constructed along
the centre of these Linies, gigantic causeways
of wooden planking, each above a mile in
length, perhaps, raised some two feet above
the level of the mud, and along which the
dreary processions of Petersburg pedestrians
were enabled to pass. This was exceedingly
commodious, as long as you merely wanted
to walk for walking sake; but of course,
wherever a perspective intersected the Linie,
there was a break in the causeway, and then