remains in his own land, is very fond of it;
but, once persuaded to quit it, he thoroughly
naturalises himself in the country which he
has adopted, and forgets all about Denmark
and Sweden. As to the Americans, they never
have any homes. They locate; and as gladly
locate at Spitzbergen as at Hartford,
Connecticut. The Poles, perhaps, are really
attached to home; but the Czar is in possession
; and we know that the most home-
loving Briton would be loth to go back to
his little house in Camberwell if he was
aware of an abhorrent broker's man sitting
in the front parlour.

There is a Baba, a peasant girl, who is sitting
listlessly on a rough-hewn bench at the
door of one of the homogeneous hovels. She
is not quite unoccupied, for she has the head
of a gawky girl of ten on her knee, and is—
well, I need not describe the universal
pastime with which uncleanly nations fill up
their leisure time.

The Baba is of middle size: a strong, well-
hung, likely wench enough. Her face and
arms are burnt to a most disagreeable tawny,
tan brown; the colour of the pigskin of a
second-hand saddle that has been hanging for
months—exposed to every weather—outside
a broker's shop in Vinegar Yard, Drury Lane,
London, is, perhaps, the closest image I can give
of her face's hue. Nay; there is a wood, or
rather preparation of wood, used by
upholsterers—not rosewood, ebony, mahogany,
walnut, oak, but a fictitiously browned, ligneous
substance, called Pembroke. I have seen it, at
sales, go in the guise of a round table for one
pound nine. I mind it in catalogues:
pembroke chest of drawers—pembroke work-
table. I know its unwholesome colour, and
dully, blinking, sheen, which no bees-wax, no
household-stuff, no wash-leather can raise to
a generous polish. Pembroke is the Russian
peasant complexion. The forehead low and
receding. The roots of the hair of a
dirty straw-colour, (growing in alarmingly
close proximity to the eyebrows, as if they
were originally the "same concern," and
the low forehead a bone of contention which
had grown up between them and
dissolved the partnership). Set very close
together, in this brown face, are two eyes—
respectable as to size—and light-blue in
colour, which, as the orbs themselves are
quite lustreless and void of speculation, has
a very weird—not to say horrifying—effect.
The nose broad, thick, unshapely, as if the
os-nasi had been suddenly covered up with a
lump of clay, but that no refinements of
moulding, no hesitating compromises between
the Roman, the pug, and the snub had been
gone through. It is as though Nature had
done some million of these noses by contract,
and they had been clapped indiscriminately
on as many million moujik faces. Not to
grow Slawkenbergian on the subjects of
noses, I may conclude, nasally, by remarking
that the nostrils are wide apart—quite
circular—and seemingly punched, rather
than perforated, with a violent contempt
of reference to the requirements of
symmetry of position. The mouth is not bad,
—lips red enough—teeth remarkably sound
and white—and the entire features would be
pleasant, but that the mouth-corners are
drawn down, and that the under lip is
pendulous not sensuously, but senselessly. The
chin has a curious triangular dimple in the
centre; for all the organs of hearing visible,
the Baba might be as earless—she is
certainly as unabashed—as Defoe; the neck
is the unmitigated bull pattern: short,
clumsy, thick-set, and not, I am afraid,
very graceful in a young female; the
shoulders broad and rounded (that back is
well-accustomed to carrying burdens, and
prodigious burdens the Russian women do
carry sometimes); the feet are large, long, and
flat, the hands not very large, but terribly
corrugated as to their visible venous economy.
How could it be otherwise when every
species of manual labour (they build log-
houses, though I have not seen them lay
bricks) except horse-driving, is shared with
the ruder sex by women. The Babas of a
Russian village have their specially
feminine employments, it is true. They may
spin flax; they may weave; they may
cook; they may wash linen; but it is at
the sole will and pleasure of the seigneur
or the bourmister if they are in Corvée to
him, to set them tasks of sawing wood, or
plastering walls, or dragging trucks, or
whatever else may suit his seignorial or
bourmistral caprice. If the Baba, or her husband,
or father, or whoever else owns her labour—
for an independent spinster, an unprotected
Russian female is, save in the upper classes, not
to be found—is at Obrok, instead of Corvée,
the employments he may give to his Baba
may be even more miscellaneous. I have
seen women in Russia occupied in the most
incongruous manner; standing on ladders,
whitewashing, sweeping streets, hammering
at pots and kettles, like tinkers; driving pigs;
and, in the Gostinnoï-Dvors, selling second-
hand goods by auction?

I have alluded to the Baba's feet. The
Russian nobility are as sensitive as the late
Lord Byron as to the aristocratic presages to
be drawn from a small hand and foot. I
have frequently heard in Russian society that
genteel dictum common in England, that no
person can be well-born unless water will
flow beneath the arch of his instep without
wetting it. I believe that in the short reign
of his late Majesty Richard, third of that
name, similar notions began to be entertained
in polite society with reference to humps.

The Baba's dress is not pretty. To do her
justice, though, there cannot be the slightest
doubt as to her possession of—well, not a shirt
—that is a masculine garment, but a——
but it is unpardonable to mention in English
what every English lady will name in the