or eating-house waiter, when you order a chop,
is "Sluschett " (I hear and obey). Will any
man believe that this system of slavery, which
would appear to be the growth of twenty
centuries, which has its language, and proverbs,
and folk-lore, is, in its authorised and
consolidated form, barely two hundred and
fifty years old? It only dates, legally, from
the reign of Boris Godounoff. But I
happened to speak of dictionaries. Oyez, oyez !
let all men know that the imperial Catherine,
second of that name, and of imperishable
memory, positively issued, one day—perhaps
in an access of capricious philanthropy, and
after receiving a letter from D'Alembert —an
oukase ordering the word Slave to be for
ever and ever erased and expunged from the
imperial dictionary. The philosophical firm
of D'Alembert, Diderot, and Co., made a
great deal of this at the time, and there have
been some attempts to make more of it since.
For my part,  I must say that the imperial
word-suppression reminds me very much of
the manner in which penitent (in Pentonville)
housebreakers speak of their last
burglary (accompanied by violence), as their
culpable folly.  And yet this wretched
people seem as habituated and to the manner
born to slavery, as if they had been serfs
from the time when it was said to Ham, " A
slave and a servant shalt thou be;" and as
if there were really any truth in the grinning
theory of the German traveller, that the
Russian back was organised to receive
blows, and that his nerves are less delicate
than those of western nations.

The reader has been deigning, I am afraid,
to wait a long time for the conclusion of the
inventory of the Starosta's house at Volnoï;
and I have been in truth an unconscionable
time in possession.  But the Starosta's house,
though it is but a log hut, is full of pegs to
hang thoughts upon; though I must now
really leave the pegs, and give the walls a turn .
There are thereupon some more works of
art—secular ones—besides the ecclesiastical
triumph of the blessed Saint Nicholas. In
poorer cottages (if the pretty, homely, ivy
and honeysuckle smelling name of cottage
can be applied to the dreary dull dens the
Russians live in), these lay pictures would
probably be merely the ordinary Loubotchynia,
vile daubs of the reigning Czar, or
of Petr' Velikè, glaring on sheets of bark, or
the coarsest paper. But the Starosta being
rich, he has four notable engravings—real
engravings, apparently executed in a very
coarse taille douce upon white paper,
brilliantly if not harmoniously coloured; framed,
in what may be termed, cabbage-rose wood,
so vividly red and shining is it, and duly
glazed. There is, of course, the late Czar
Nicholas —one of the portraits taken of him
about twenty years since—when his
admirers delighted in describing him as an
Apollo with the bearing of Jupiter, and the
strings of his lyre twisted into thunderbolts.
When he wore a tremendous cocked hat,
shipped fore and aft; that eagle-crowned
helmet on the imperial head, with which we
became acquainted through the pleasant
pages of Punch, was the invention of a
French painter, or rather military draughtsman,
of whom the Czar was so fond that he
could scarcely be prevailed upon to allow
him to leave Russia, much less withdraw his
silver roubles from the bank—was not
adopted till eighteen-forty-six or seven.
There is, almost equally, of course, a
portrait of another Czar—the White Czar—for
whom, though he was their enemy, the
Russian people have a singular and almost
superstitious admiration. The Malakani, or
little wise men of Jalmboff, believed him,
forty years since, to be the lion of the valley of
Jehoshaphat, sent by Heaven to dethrone the
false emperor (the Malakani hold, like many
others neither little nor wise, by the illegitimacy
of the Romanoffs). There are many
thousands, if not millions, of the common
Russians, who believe to this day that the
secret of the reverses sustained by the holy
Russian arms in the Crimea (the reverses
themselves, believe me, are, notwithstanding
the lies of the Invalide Russe, no secret at
home, for thousands of crippled soldiers have
gone home to their villages to tell how
soundly they were licked in the valley of the
Tchernaya), that the secrets of the defeats of
Alma and Inkermann and Balaclava, and the
Malakhoff, was in the presence among the
French hosts of the famous White Czar,
miraculously resuscitated, and reigning at this very
time over the Ivansoutskis in Paris-Gorod.
One need not go as far as Volnoï-Volostchok
to find a similar superstition.  In the alpine
departments of France there are plenty of
peasants who believe that the astute gentleman
who lives at the Tuileries (when he is at
home, which is but seldom) is the self-same
conqueror and king whose sweetest music
was his horses' hoofs' notes as he galloped
into conquered cities; who vanquished at
Marengo, and was crowned at Notre Dame,
and saw Moscow blaze before his eyes like a
pine torch; and ran away from Waterloo,
and died upon the rock; and did the work
of forty centuries in but fifty-two years of
the Pyramids' brick life.

The third picture, and the third whose
presence here is still a matter of course (for
the loyalty of the present must be satisfied as
well as that of the past) is a portrait of the
reigning Czar. His Alexandrian majesty is
represented in the act of reviewing his
doughty and faithful Preobajinski Guards.
The emperor and his guard are drawn
upon about the same size of relative grandeur
as Garagautua and his courtiers in
the illustrations to Rabelais, by the
incomparable M. Gustave Doré. The emperor,
according to the laws of Brook
Taylor's Perspective (which, not being in
the forty-five volumes of the Russian code,