watering-place season; where, under the
process of accomplishing the desired result,
the time passes so pleasantly that—I have
serious thoughts of turning stammerer, in
order to be cured by Mr. Chase, and be
introduced by him to Lord D., unless Lord D. and
Mr. Chase are one,—and perhaps become
Lord E. or Lord F. myself.

A JOURNEY DUE NORTH.
MERCHANTS AND MONEY-CHANGERS

I HAVE heard boots spoken of (not in
very polite society) by the name of Steppers.
I am in a position, now, to trace the
etymology of the expression. Steppers are
derived, evidently, from the enormous Steppe
boots which the merchants in the Sapagi-
Linie have to sell. Do you know what
mudlarks' boots are? I mean such as
are worn by the sewer-rummagers of Paris,
which boots cost a hundred francs a pair,
and of which only three pairs are allowed by
the municipality per escouade, or squad of
mudlarks. Of such are the Steppe boots:
only bigger, only thicker, only properer for
carrying stores and sundries, besides legs, like
Sir Hudibras's trunk-hose. I don't know if
hippopotamus's hide be cheap in Russia, or
rhinoceros's skin a drug in the market; but of
one or other of this class of integuments the
Steppe boots seem to be made. When they
become old, the leather forms itself into
horny scales and bony ridges; the thread
they are sewn with may turn into wire; the
soles become impregnated with flinty particles,
and calcined atoms of loamy soil, and so
concrete, and more durable; but, as for wearing
away on the outside, you never catch the
Steppe boots doing that. They are not
altogether exempt from decay, either, these
Blunderborean boots; and, like Dead Sea
apples, are frequently rotten within, while
their exterior is stout and fair to look upon;
for they are lined throughout (and an
admirably warm and comfortable lining it
makes) with sheepskin, dressed to a silky
state of softness, and curried into little
spherical tufts, like the wool on a blackamoor's
head with whom the great difficulty
of ages has been overcome, and who has been
washed white. For ornament's sake, the
sheepskin is superseded round the tops by
bands of rabbit or miniver skin; and there
is a complicated apparatus of straps, buckles,
and strings, to keep the boots at due mid-
thigh height. But there is a profligate insect
called the moth,—a gay, fluttering, volatile,
reckless scapegrace, always burning candles
at both ends, and burning his own silly
fingers in the long run, who has an
irrepressible penchant for obtaining board and
lodging gratis in the woolly recesses of the
sheepskin lining. Here he lives with several
other prodigals, his relatives, in the most
riotous and wasteful fashion—living on the
fat, or rather, the wool of the land, and most
ungratefully devouring the very roof that
covers him. He sneezes at camphor, and
defies dusting; and he and his crew would very
speedily devour every atom of your boot-
linings, but for the agency of a very powerful
and, to moth, deadly substance, called
mahorka. Mahorka is the very strongest, coarsest,
essential-oiliest tobacco imaginable. It
smells—ye gods, how it smells! It smokes
as though it were made of the ashes of the
bottomless pit, mingled with the leaves of
the upas-tree, seasoned with assafœtida and
coculus indicus. It is, altogether, about the
sort of tobacco against which James the
First might have written his Counterblast,
and a pipe of which he might have offered
the devil, as a digester to his proposed repast
of a pig, and a poll of ling, with mustard.
This mahorka (the only tobacco the common
people care about smoking) is, by Pavel or
Dmitrych, your servants, rubbed periodically
into the lining of your boots (and into your
schooba, too, and whatever other articles of
furriery you may happen to possess), causing
the silly moth to fly away,—if, indeed, it
leave him any wings to fly, or body to fly
away with. It kills all insects, and it nearly
kills you, if you incautiously approach too
closely to a newly-mahorka'd boot. Pavel and
Dmitrych, too, are provokingly addicted to
dropping the abominable stuff about, and
rubbing it into dress-coats and moire-antique
waistcoats, not only irrevocably spoiling those
garments, but producing the same sternutatory
effects on your olfactory nerves, as though
somebody had been burning a warming-pan
full of cayenne pepper in your apartment. All
things admitted, however, mahorka is a
sovereign specific against moths.

Every social observance in Russia is tranché
—peculiar to one of the two great classes: it
is a noble's custom, or a moujik's custom, but
is never common to both. Russian gentlemen,
within doors, are incessant smokers;
the common people use very little tobacco.
You never see a moujik smoking a cigar, and
very rarely even enjoying his pipe. In some
of the low Vodki shops I have seen a group
of moujiks with one blackened pipe among
them, with a shattered bowl and scarcely
any stem, charged with this same mahorka.
The pipe was passed from hand to hand,
each smoker taking a solemn whiff, and
giving a placid grunt, exactly as you may see
a party of Irish bogtrotters doing in a
Connemara shebeen. Down south in Russia—I
mean in the governments of Koursk and
Woronesch, there is a more Oriental fashion
of smoking in vogue. Some mahorka, with
more or less dirt, is put into a pipkin, in
whose sides a few odd holes have been
knocked; and the smokers crouch over it
with hollow sticks, reeds, or tin tubes, each
man to a hole, and puff away at the common
bowl. It is not that the Russian peasant
does not care for his pipe; but he has
an uneasy consciousness that the luxurious