countess. If you like those odours gently
blended one with the other, you would revel
in Tamboff boots. But perhaps you like the
odour of roast meat better, and cannot abide
the smell of any leather. There are many
men as as many tastes as minds to them, we
know. There are some that cannot abide a
gaping pig; and I have heard of people who
swooned at the sight of Shapsygar cheese,
and became hysterical at the smell of garlic.

Who has not heard of the world-famous
Kasan boots? Well; perhaps not quite
world-famous—there are to be sure a good
many things Russian, and deservedly
celebrated there, which are quite unknown
beyond the limits of the Empire. At all events,
the boots of Kasan deserve to be famous all
over the world; and I will do my best—
though that may be but little—to make
them known to civilised Europe. The Kasan
boot supplies the long-sought-after and
sighed-for desideratum of a slipper that will
keep on—of a boot that the wearer may lounge
and kick his legs about in, unmindful of the
state of his stocking-heels (I do not allude
to holes, though they will happen in the best
regulated bachelor families, but to darns,
which, though tidier, are equally distasteful
to the sight), or a boot-slipper, or slipper-
boot, which can be pulled off and on with far
greater ease than a glove; which cannot be
trodden down at heel, and which will last
through all sorts of usage a most delightfully
unreasonable time. The Kasan boot is
innately Tartar, and the famous Balslagi
of the Turkish women—loose, hideous, but
comfortable boots of yellow leather which
they pull over their papouches when they go
a bathing or a bazaaring—are evidently
borrowed from the Kasan prototype. This, to
be descriptive after having been (not unduly)
eulogistic, is a short boot of the highlow
pattern, usually of dark crimson leather (other
colours can be had, but red is the favourite
with the Russians). There is a cushion-like
heel, admirably yielding and elastic, and a sole
apparently composed of tanned brown paper,
so slight and soft is it, but which is quite tough
enough and landworthy enough for any
lounging purpose. It is lined with blue silk,
whose only disadvantage is, that if you wear
the Kasan boot, as most noble Russians do
(without stockings), the dye of the silk being
rather imperfectly fixed, comes off on your
flesh, and gives you the appearance of an
ancient indigo-stained Briton. The shin and
instep of the Kasan boot are made rich and
rare by the most cunning and fantastic
workmanship in silver-thread and beadwork, and
mosaic and marqueterie, or buhl-work, or
inlaying—call it what you will—of different-
coloured leathers. There is a tinge of the
Indian mocassin about it, a savour of the
carpets of Ispahan, a touch of the dome of
St. Mark's, Venice; but a pervading and
preponderating flavour of this wild-beast-
with-his-hide-painted-and-his-claws-gilt
country. It isn't Turkish, it isn't
Byzantine, it isn't Venetian, it isn't Moyen-
age Bohemian. Why or how should it
be, indeed, seeing that it is a boot from
Kasan in Russia! Yet it has, like the
monstrous Gostinnoï-dvor, its most certain dim
characteristics of all the first four mentioned
nationalities, which all succumb, though, in
the long run to the pure barbaric Muscovite
element, unchanged and unchangeable (for
all thy violent veneering, Peter Velikè) from
the days of Rurik and Boris-Goudonof, and
the false Demitrius. Every rose has a thorn
—every advantage its drawback, and the
quaint, cosy, luxuriant boot of Kasan has
one, in the shape of a very powerful and
remarkably unpleasant odour, of which fried
candle-grease and a wet day in Bermondsey
would appear to be the chief components.
Whether the men of Kasan have some secret
or subtle grease wherewith to render the
leather supple, and that the disagreeable
odour is so inherent to and inseparable from
it as the nasty taste from that precious
among medicaments, castor oil; or whether
the Kasan boot smell is simply one of the
nine hundred and twelve distinct Russian
stenches, of whose naturalisation in all the
Russias, Enter, Malte-Brun, and other
savans, scientific and geographical, have been
unaccountably silent, is uncertain; but so it
is. We must accept the Kasan boot as it
is, and not repine at its powerful odour.
Camphor will do much; philosophy more;
acclimatisation to Russian smells, most of all.
There is certainly no invention for morning
lounging that can equal this delightful boot.
Our common Western slipper is an inelegant,
slipshod, dangling, prone to bursting-at-the-
side-imposition (that I had any chance of
obtaining those beauteous silk-and-bead
slippers thou hast been embroidering for the last
two years, Oh, Juliana!) There is
certainly something to be said in favour of
the highly-arched Turkish papouche. It
is very easy to take off; but then, it is very
difficult to keep on; though, for the
purpose of correcting an impertinent domestic
on the mouth, its sharp wooden heel is
perhaps unrivalled. There are several men I
should like to kick, too, with a papouche—
its turned-lip toe is at once contemptuous
and pain-inflicting. I have heard it said that
the very best slippers in the world are an
old pair of boots, ventilated with corn-valves
made with a razor; but the sage who gave
utterance to that opinion, sensible as it is,
would change his mind if I had bethought
myself of bringing him home a pair of Kasan
boots. I have but one pair, of which, at the
risk of being thought selfish, I do not mean,
under any circumstances, to deprive myself. I
have but to thrust my foot out of bed in the
morning, for the Kasan boot to come, as it
were of its own volition, and nestle to my
foot till it has coiled itself round it, rather
than shod me. I may toast the soles of