Leeds or Bradford, its birthplace, perhaps
fifty shillings; but for which the Starosta has
paid at the fair of Wishnoï-Woloschtchok
(which you are not, by any means, to confound
with my Volnoï) as much as one hundred
roubles in paper assignations, or twenty-five
in silver—a matter of four pounds English,
There are real silver buttons to it, and it is
lined with silk, and encircled by the gold and
silver-embroidered girdle which, carefully
wrapped in tissue-paper, lies beside it; it is a
very swellish and dashing garment. His
Starostaship's ordinary or work-a-day costume
is a long loose coat of coarse grey frieze very
Irish in texture, though not in fashion; and
a bell-crowned hat—we have not yet seen it
on his head, though—decidedly Irish, both
in material and make. The sash is of gaudy
colours, but of the coarsest cotton fabric:
purchased at the Gostinnoï-Dvor of Twer,
most likely, and manufactured in the sham
Manchester mill of some seigneur anxious to
increase his revenues by cotton-lordism. Was
there ever such a land of contradictions as
this Muscovy? Our heaven-born aristocracy,
or at least their great majority, think trade
and manufactures derogatory to the pearls
and velvet of their coronets. It is a standing
joke with us that we have one peer of the
realm who has so far forgotten his dignity as
to be a coal-merchant, and another who is a
tin-man. Yet the Russian aristocracy,
incomparably the proudest in the world, do not
think it a slur on their dignity to work
cotton-factories, soap-boiling establishments,
sugar-bakeries, candle-manufactories,
tanneries, and iron-foundries. Imagine
"Norfolk, Westminster, and  Co., bone-boilers,
Vauxhall, London!"

In this trunk of suppositions the wealthy
Starosta—has sing it O choir of Westminster
Abbey!—three shirts of three different
colours; the red, white, and blue; but he
wears them not. No; wary old man! He
keeps them against the day when Sophron,
the oily drunkard shall be married, or some
one other of his numerous grand-children
shall enter into the wedded state. There
is, actually and politically, a considerable
infusion of communism in the rival
institutions of this incoherent nightmare country;
and, as regards garments, the doctrines of
Messieurs Proudhon and Robert Owen
are astonishingly prevalent among the
common people. The fable of the two friends
who had but one coat, hat, and addenda
between them is realised here. Sons wear
their fathers' shirts, and grandsires their
grandsons' hats. The socialism as regards
boots is wonderful. The peasant lasses
wear the peasant lads' boots habitually (not
as a task allotted to a subjugated sex, of
wearing the new boots easy for the men folk
to walk in, but turn and turn about.  If
Vacil be at home, Tatiana goes to the fields in
Vacil's upper-leathers, and vice versâ.) Very
frequently there are but two pairs of boots to
a very numerous family, and great economy
is necessarily observed in wearing them.
You may often see, even in the suburbs of
Petersburg and Moscow, gangs of peasant
girls and young men returning from the
day's work, the comeliest and strongest wearing
their family boots, the others shod
either with the ordinary lapti, or bark-basket
shoes, or going altogether bare-foot. If
it be rainy weather, the much-prized
family boots are carried slung crosswise
over the shoulders. No Vacil or Tatiana
dare, for his or her life, run the risk of
injuring the paternal slippers by contact
with mud or water.  The result, on the
return to the paternal hovel, would be such a
fearful application of leather—not boot-leather
but of a thinner and more flexible
description, and not to the feet, as would cause
Vacil to howl, and Tatiana to cry her not
very handsome eyes out.  A bran new pair
of boots are to a Russian a prize of infinite
value. I have seen a Moujik, or an Ischvostchik,
who has been able to treat himself
to such a luxury, for the first time in two
years, perhaps, lying on a bench, or—and
this is just as likely on the ground, with his
new booted legs, raised high above his head
against a wall, contemplating their newness,
toughness, and thickness, and inhaling their
villanous odour with the half-drowsy,
half-delirious mansuetude of an opium-eater of
the Theriarki-Tcharchi, over his fifth pipe.

The Starosta must have a fur robe, too, in
this chest; as well as those filthy sheepskins
which lie on the top of the stove. It must
be a foxskin schouba; or, perhaps, a
brown-bearskin, originally the property of a very
grisly customer of that ilk, shot in a Carelian
forest, by one of his sons while on a hunting
excursion with his noble Barynn, and which
he, having been miserably hugged, clawed,
and mangled in the ursine strife, was
graciously allowed to keep. And, finally, in
this chest of chests, there is a leathern bag
full of copper copecks, aud odd pieces of the
strangest and most ancient coins the Starosta
has been able, in the course of a long life-time,
to collect. The Russiaus, high and low,
have a curious and decided turn for numismatics.
There is scarcely a gentleman of any
pretensions to taste, who does not possess
something like a cabinet of rare and antique
coins and medals; and I have seen in some
merchants' leather-bag collections, such
weird, barbaric, dark age moneys and tokens,
as would make the eyes of the curators of
our museums to twinkle, and their mouths
to water.

This is the house of the Starosta. After all, I
might have given a very lucid idea of a Russian
peasant's house, by repeating a succinct
description given me by a certain young
Russian, soon after my arrival in St. Petersburg.
"A Moujik's house," he said, " is dark, and
made of wood; the floor is grey; the walls are
grey, and the roof is grey; you can cut the