separated from them. I must state, to whichever
point of the argument it may tend, that
my informant was himself a slave-owner;
and I am the more bound to make the statement,
because I have frequently heard similar
stories of the almost inexpressible cruelties
of slave-mothers to their children, from slave-
owners from the southern states of America.
It is a curious circumstance, although quite
foreign to the analogy sought to be here
conveyed, that the village of L'Estague,
near Marseilles, which was originally
colonised in the old Roman time, bears at this
day a precisely identical disreputation for
the cruelty of the mothers towards the
children.

The picture of a Russian village and
Russians at home, without a portrait of the
institution which serves the Muscovite moujik
for inglenook, cooking-range, summer siesta-
place, winter bed, wardrobe, gossiping-place,
and almost sole comfort, and alleviator of
misery—the Peetch, or stove—would be
an imposture. I want the limner's and
wood-engraver's aid here, desperately; but,
failing that, I must go to my old trade of
paper-staining, and word-stencilling, and do
my best to draw the peetch with moveable
types and printer's ink.

The Russian aristocratic stove, white,
sculptured, monumental, gigantic, is like the
sepulchre of some great man in an abbey,
which has been newly restored and beautified.
The Russian popular—I dare not for my
ear's sake say democratic—stove is, without,
wondrously like an English parish church
with a flat roof. And the model is not on
so very small a scale either; for I have seen
stoves in Russian houses, which, as a Shetland
pony is to a Barclay and Perkins' Entire
horse, might be compared in magnitude to
that smallest of parish churches—St.
Lawrence's in the Isle of Wight. The stove,
like the church has a square tower, on whose
turret pigeons coo; a choir and aisles, a
porch and vestry. It is a blind church,
having no windows; but it has plenty of
doors, and it has vaults beneath its basement,
where unsightly bodies do lie. The stove
stands sometimes boldly in the middle of the
principal apartment, as a church should do in
the centre of its parish; sometimes it is
relegated against one of the walls, three
parts of whose entire side it occupies. The
stove has a smoke-pipe, through which the
fumes of the incandescent fuel pass (but not
necessarily) into a chimney, and out of a
chimney-pot. But anywhere out of the house
is thought quite sufficient, and the chimney-
pot may be up-stairs or down-stairs, or in
my lady's chamber, so long as the smoke has
a partial outlet somewhere. I say partial; for
smoke has odd ways of curling up and
permeating through odd nooks and corners, and
pervading the house generally. It comes up
through chinks of the floor in little spirals; it
frays in umbrella-like gusts from the roof-
tree; it meets you at the door, and looks out
of the window; so that you can seldom divest
yourself of the suspicion that there must be
something smouldering somewhere which will
blaze out shortly—which there frequently
is, and does. Now for the peetch in its
entirety. Keep the ecclesiastical image
strongly in your mind; for here is the high
square tower, and there the long-bodied choir
and aisles. But you are to remember that
the peetch is composed of two separate parts
of separate nationalities. The long body is
simply, the old Russian stove—a hot
sarcophagus—a brick coffin with fire matter within,
like that of a dead man who burns before his
time. This simple brick vault full of
combustion, dates from the earliest period of
authentic Muscovite research. It is the very
same stove that was used in the days of Rurik,
and the Patriarch Nikon, and Fedor-Borissovitch.
It is the very same stove, that the
most savage of savage tribes would almost
intuitively construct,—a hole dug in the
ground, a framework of branches, the food
and fuel placed upon it, and the whole
covered in with a roof of boughs and clay
plastered over it. Not that boughs, or
branches, or wet clay, enter into the
architecture of the actual Russian stove; but
the principle is the same. And I am not
covertly insisting on the barbarism of the
Russian people because their stove is so
simple. What is our famous and boasted
Register Stove, or Rippon and Burton's
improved grate, but a hole in the wall, with a
fire-receiver uniting the capacities of an
elliptical St. Lawrence's gridiron and a
distorted bird-cage? What is the French fire-
place but a yawning cavern, with logs on
dogs, in the most primitive style of adjustment?
What is the French poêle, or stove,
but a column of St. Simeon Stylites, with a
pedestal rather too hot for the feet of the
saint, and an iron tail curling the wrong
way ? What is the Belgian stove, which
advances so impertinently into the very middle
of your chamber, but a lady's work-table in
cast-iron, and with bandy legs. What is the
German stove but a species of hot pump,
insufferably conceited and arrogant—turning
up its white porcelain nose in a corner of the
room, and burning timber living, I may so
call it, at the rate of two Prussian dollars
a-day? There is, indeed, a stove I love; a
fire-place, which combines mental improvement
and instruction with the advantages
of physical warmth and light. This is
the fire-place whose sides are lined with
the old Dutch tiles. In glorious blue and
white, there were on these tiles depicted
good and moving histories. Joseph was sold
to his brethren on these tiles; Ananias came
to a bad end, together with his wife Sapphira,
for saying the thing that was not; the Good
Samaritan left a cerulean twopence at a
smoke-dried inn; and jolly Squire Boaz met
Ruth a gleaning, and at once inspired a