narcotic is not for the likes of him. For him
to fill the pipe of his lord and master, and roll
the paper cigarettes; that should surely be
sufficient. Havn't our British matrons somewhat
similar feelings concerning their housemaid's
ringlets?

This powerful mahorka is powerless against
the Russian bug. That hateful brown-uniformed
monster, who is voracious, bloodsucking,
impudent, and evil-smelling enough
to be a Russian functionary, and to have a
grade in the Tchinn, laughs a horse-leech laugh
at mahorka. He would smoke a pipe thereof
without winking, I am convinced. I knew a
lady in St. Petersburg whose sleeping apartment
(hung with sky-blue silk, fluted, and
forming one of a suite rented at two hundred
roubles a month) was so infested with arch
bugs, that she would have gone into a high fever
for want of rest, if febrile symptoms had not
been counteracted by faintness with loss of
blood. She was a buxom woman originally,
and grew paler and paler every day. She
tried camphor; she tried vinegar; she tried
turpentine; she tried a celebrated vermin
annihilator powder, which had been given to
her by my friend Nessim Bey (otherwise
Colonel Washington Lafayette Bowie, U.S.),
and which had been used with great success
by that gallant condottiere while campaigning
against the bugs—and the Russians—with
Omer Pasha in Anatolia. But all was in
vain. The brown vampires rioted on that
fair flesh, and brought all their brothers, like
American sight-seers. The lady was in
despair, and applied, at last, to a venerable
Russian friend, decorated with the cross of
St. Stanislas, second class, high up in the
ministry of imperial appanages, and who had
resided for more than half a century in St.
Petersburg.

"How can you kill bugs, general?" (of
course he was a general) she asked.

"Madame," he answered, "I think it might
be done with dogs and a double-barrelled
gun!"

This, though hyperbolical, is really the
dernier mot of the vermin philosophy. If
you want to destroy bugs, you must either go
to bed in plate-armour, and so, rolling about,
squash them, or you must sit up patiently
with a moderator-lamp, a cigar, and a
glass of grog, and hunt them. You will be a
mighty hunter before the morning. Don't be
sanguine enough to imagine that you can kill
the wretches with the mere finger and thumb.
I have found a pair of snuffers serviceable in
crushing their lives out. A brass wafer-stamp
(if you have a strong arm and a sure aim) is
not a bad thing to be down on them with; I
have heard a noose, or lasso of packthread, to
snare and strangle them unawares, spoken of
favourably; but a hammer, and a ripping-chisel
of the pattern used by the late Mr. Manning,
are the best vermin annihilators! I think the
Russian government ought to give a premium
for every head of bugs brought to the chief
police-office, as our Saxon kings used to do
for wolves. Only I don't think the imperial
revenue would quite suffice for the first
week's premium—were it but the tenth part
of a copeck per cent.

The subject of vermin always raises my ire,
even when I fall across it accidentally. I
have been so bitten! We can pardon a cripple
for denouncing the vicious system of swaddling
babies; and who could be angry with
Titus Oates for declaiming against the
iniquity of corporal punishment?

Unless I have made up my mind to take
lodgings in the Boot Row of the Gostinnoï-
Dvor—which as there are no dwelling-rooms
there, would be but a cold-ground lodging—it
is very nearly time for me, I opine, to leave off
glozing over boots, and go elsewhere. But I
could write a quarto about them. Once more,
however, like the thief at Tyburn, traversing
the cart, often taking leave, because loth to
depart, I must claim a fresh, though brief
reprieve; for see! here are the children's boots;
and you who love the little people, must come
with me, and gaze.

Such boot-vines!—such espaliers of shoes!
such pendant clusters of the dearest, tottiest,
nattiest, gaudiest, miniatures of grown-men's
boots, all intended for young Russia! Field-
Marshals' boots, Chevalier Guards' boots,
steppe boots, courier boots, cossack boots,
Lesquian boots, Kasan boots, but all fitted to
the puddy feet of the civil and military
functionaries of the empire of Lilliput. Long
live the Czar Tomas Thumbovitch, second of
the name! And all the boots are picturesque.
For the Russians have a delightful custom of
dressing their little children, either in the
quaint old Muscovite costume, or in the dress
of some tributary, or conquered, or mediatised
nation. One of the nous autres, adult,
must wear, perforce, either some choking
uniform, or else a suit from Jencens on the
Nevskoï, and of the latest Parisian cut;
but, as a little boy—from four to eight years
old say (for, after that, he becomes a cadet,
and is duly choked in a military uniform,
and bonnetted with a military head-dress),
he wears the charming costume of a little
Pole, or a Circassian, or a Lesquian, or a
Mongol, or a Kirghiz, or a Cossack of the
Don, the Wolga, the Oural, the Ukraine,
or the Taurida. Nothing prettier than to
see these dumpy little Moscovs toddling
along with their mammas, or their nurses,
in the verdant alleys of the Summer
Garden; huge, flattened-pumpkin shaped Cossack
turban-caps, or Tartar tarbouches, or
Volhynian Schliapas, or Armenian calpacks on
their heads; their tiny bodies arrayed in
costly little caftans, some of Persian silk
stiff with embroidery, some of velvet, some
of the soft Circassian camel and goat-hair
fabrics, some of cloth of gold, or silver;
with splendiferous little sashes, and jewelled
cartouch-cases on their breasts, and sparkling
yataghans, and three-hilted poignards