complete apparatus for inward restoration.
We have a comfortable square box covered
with tin, which unthinking persons might
rashly assume to be a dressing-case, but
which in reality contains a pint-and-a-half
samovar; a store of fine charcoal thereunto
belonging; a tchaïnik, or tea-pot of terra
cotta, tea-cups, knives, forks, and tea-canister.
If we were real Russians—hot as it is—we
should incite Petr' Petrovitch to kindle a
fire, heat the samovar, and set to tea-drinking
with much gusto.  As we have Anglo-Saxon
notions, if not blood, we resort to that other
compartment of the tin chest where the
mighty case-bottle of cold brandy and water
is—large, squab, flat, and fitting into the
bottom of the box.  Then, each lighting a
papiros, we throw ourselves back in the
calcêche.  Petr' Petrovitch has not been
forgotten in the case-bottle line, and bid our
conductor to resume the grandest of Scuds.  We
have an indefinite idea that we shall come
upon one of Prince Bouillabaissoff's villages in
an hour or so.  This, too, is about the time
to tell you that Alexis, though an imperial
page, is clad in a Jim Crow hat, a baker's
jacket, nankeen pantaloons, and a Madras
handkerchief loosely tied round his turn-down
shirt collar.  These are the vacations of the
imperial pages—very long vacations they have—
from May to August, and once in the country
Alexis may dress as he pleases; but, in St.
Petersburg, it would be as much as his large
ears are worth to appear without the
regulation choke outfit—the sword, casque, belt,
and, to use an expression of Mumchance,
"coat buttoned up to here."  Friend of my
youth! why canst thou not come with me
from the Rents of Tattyboys to All the
Russias?  For here thou wouldst find, not
one or two, but millions of men, all with their
coats buttoned up to here.

I said ONE of Prince Bouillabaissoff's
villages, for the prince is a proprietor on a large
scale, and owns nearly a dozen, containing in
all some twenty hundred douscha (souls) or
serfs.  But our grand scud principle is
vindicated when we diverge from the marshes and
the baked clods into the commencement of a
smooth well-kept road, and learn from Petr'
Petrovitch, whom we have hitherto foreborne
interrogating, that we are approaching the
village of M. de Katorichassoff.

The good Russian roads are oases between
deserts.  In the immediate vicinity of the
seigneur's residence the roads are beautifully
kept.  No English park avenue could surpass
them in neatness, regularity, smoothness—
nay, prettiness and cheerfulness.  There are
velvety platebandes of greensward by the
roadside, and graceful poplars, and sometimes
elms.  But once out of the baron's domains,
and even the outlying parts of his territory,
the roads—high and bye—become the pitiable
paths of travail and ways of tribulation, of
which I have hinted in the Czar's Highway.
There is a humorous fiction that the
proprietors of the soil are bound to keep the
public roads in order, and another legend—
but more satirical than humorous—that the
goverment pays a certain yearly sum for the
well-keeping of the roads.   Government money
is an ignis fatuical and impalpable thing in
Russia.  You may pay, but you do not receive.
As to the proprietors they will see the
government barbacued before they will do anything
they are not absolutely compelled to do; and the
upshot of the matter is, that a problem
something like the following is offered for solution.
If two parties are bound to perform a
contract of mutual service, and neither party
performs it, which party has a right to
complain?

M. de Katorichassoff, however—or rather
Herr Vandergutlers, his North German
bourmister, or intendant, for the noble Barinn
is no resident just now (Hombourg, roulette,
and so forth)—would very soon know
the reason why all the roads about the
seigneurial village were not kept in apple-pie
order.  They say that in Tsarskoe-Selo palace
gardens, near Petersburg, there is a corporal
of invalids to run after every stray leaf that
has fallen from a tree, and a police officer to
take every unauthorised pebble on the gravel
walks into custody.  Without going so far as
this, it is certain that there are plenty of
peasants, mis à corvée, that is, working three
compulsory days' labour for the lord, to mend
and trim the roads, clip the platebandes, and
prune the trees; and the result is, ultimately,
a charmingly umbrageous avenue through
which we make our entrance into Volnoï-
Voloschtchok.

Though M. de K. (you will excuse the rest
of the name, I know) has only one village, he
has determined to do everything in it en
grand seigneur.  He has a church and a
private police-station, and a common granary
for corn; and, wonder of wonders, he has a
wooden watch-tower surmounted by a
circular iron balcony, and with the customary
apparatus of telegraphic signals in case of
fire.  As you can see the whole of the village
of Volnoï—its one street, the château of the
Barinn, and the mill of Mestrophan-
Kouprianoritch—at one glance, standing on the level
ground, and as there are no other buildings
for ten miles round, the utility of a watch-
tower does not seem very obvious.  Still, let
us have discipline, or die.  So there were
watchmen, I suppose, at one time; but the
balcony is tenantless now, and one of the
yellow balls is in a position, according to the
telegraphic code, denoting a raging
conflagration somewhere.  There is nothing on fire,
that I know of, except the sun.  Where is the
watchman, too?  There are plenty of
vigorous old men with long white beards, who
would enact to the life the part of that
dreary old sentinel in Agamemnon the King,
who, in default of fire, or water, or the
enemy, or whatever else he is looking out
for, prognosticates such dismal things about