eat ices at Dominique's on the Nevskoï with
much grace, and he was quite a lady's man!

Alexis Hardshellovitch does not feel his
exceptional and abnormal position to any
painful extent; inasmuch as, though one of
the worthiest and most amiable fellows alive,
he is a tremendous fool.  He is a white
Russian,—not coming from White Russia,
understand, but with white eyelashes, and
fawn-coloured hair, and a suety complexion,
and eyes that have not been warranted to
wash, for they have run terribly, and the
ground-colour has been quite boiled out of
them.  He has a glimmering, but not decided
notion, of his want of brains himself.  "I
know I am ugly," he candidly says; "my
dear good mother always told me so, and my
father, who was bel homme, used to hit me
cracks because I had such large ears.  I
must be ugly, because the Director of the
Corps has never selected me to be sent to the
palace as a page of the chamber.  I should
like to be a page of the chamber, for they
wear chamarrures of gold bullion on their
skirts behind; but they only pick out the
handsome pages.  They say I should give
the Empress an attack of nerves with my
ears.  Yet I am a general and ambassador's
son.  I.  Some—"  He spits. "But I'm not;
a fool.  No; I guess not.  Prince
Bouillabaissoff says I am bête; but Genghis Khan
tells me that I have the largest head of all
the imperial pages.  How can I be a fool
with such a large head?  Tell."  The honest
youth has, it must be admitted, an enormous
nut.  Though I love him for his goodness
and simplicity, I am conscious always of an
uneasy desire to take that head of his
between my hands, as if it were indeed a nut,
and of the cocoa species, and crack it against
a stone wall, to see if there be any milk to be
accounted for, inside.

I have been staying, in this broiling mid-
summer mad-dog weather, at the hospitable
country mansion of Alexis Hardshellovitch's
aunts; and we two have come on the Grand
Scud in a respectable old calêche, supposed
to have been purchased in France by the
diplomatic general during the occupation of
Paris by the allies in eighteen hundred and
fifteen.  It has been pieced and repaired by
two generations of Russian coach-cobblers
since; has been re-lined with some fancy
stuff which I believe to have been, in the
origin, window-curtains; the vehicle,
probably, has not been painted since the
Waterloo campaign, but the wheels are plentifully
greased; we have an ample provision of
breaks and drags, and "skids;" we have
three capital horses—one a little black
Bitchok—lithe, limber, long-maned and
vicious, but an admirable galloper, and dressée à
la volée, and we have a very paragon of a
postilion or coachman—I scarcely know
whether to call him Ischvostchik or Jemstchik,
for now he sits on the box; and now he
bestrides the splashboard, where the splinter-
bar is his brother, and the traces make
acquaintance with his boots.  I say he is a
paragon; for he can go a week without
getting drunk, never falls asleep on the box,
and however bad the roads may be, never
lands the calêche in a deep hole.   Inexhaustibly
good-tempered and untiringly musical he
is, of course: he would not be a Russian else.
He belongs to Alexis—or rather, will do so
at his majority; when that large-headed
page will possess much land and many beeves
—human beeves, I mean with beards and
boots, and baggy breeches.  But I don't
think that Alexis will administer much
STICK to his slaves when he comes to his
kingdom. He has a hard shell, but a soft
heart.

It is lucky we have Petr' Petrovitch the
paragon with us in our journey from Rjew,
for we have long left the great Moscow Road
(I don't speak of the rail but of the chaussée)
and have turned into an abominable Sentier
de Traverse, a dreadful region, where marshes
have had the black vomit, and spumed
lumps of misshapen raven-like forest—black
roots of trees—inky jungles, so to speak.  Can
you imagine anything more horrible than a
dwarf-forest—for the trees are never tall
hereabout—stems and branches hugger-muggering
close together like conspirators weaving some
diabolical plot, with here and there a gap of
marsh pool between the groups of trees, as if
some woodland criminals, frightened at their
own turpitude, had despairingly drowned
themselves, and ridded the earth of their black
presence.  Some corpses of these float on the
surface of the marsh, but the summer time
has been as merciful to them as the red-
breasts were to the children in the wood, and
has covered them with a green pall.  There
must be capital teal, and widgeon, and snipe-
shooting here, in autumn—shooting enough
to satisfy that insatiate sportsman, Mr. Ivan
Tourguénieff; but, at present, the genus
homo does not shoot.  He is shot by red-
dart from the inexhaustible quiver of the
sun.  He does not hunt; he is hunted by
rolling clouds of pungent dust, by disciplined
squadrons of gnats, and by flying cohorts of
blue bottles and gadflies.  The sun has baked
the earth into angular clods, and our calêche
and horses go hopping over the acclivities
like a daddy-long-legs weak in the knee-
joints over a home-baked crusty loaf.  There
is no cultivation in this part—no trees—
no houses.  I begin to grow as hotly thirsty
as on that famous day when I drank out
of POT, walking twenty miles, from
Lancaster to Preston; but out of evil cometh
good in Russian travelling.  As you are
perfectly certain, before starting, that you will
not find any houses of entertainment on the
road, except at stated distances; and that the
refreshments provided there will probably
be intolerable, no person in a sane mental
condition either rides or drives a dozen miles
in the country without taking with him a