England have by this time come home for the
holidays; so have the big and little boys who
wear the spiked helmets, and swords, and
cocked-hats, before their time in St. Petersburg,
come home for their Midsummer holidays.
From the first, and second, and third
cadet corps; from the school of imperial
pages, and the corps des Porte-Enseignes de
la Garde; from the School of Mines, and the
School of Forests, and the School of Roads
and Bridges, and the School of Artillery, and
the School of Fireworks and Blue Blazes
(which last educational establishment I have
been led impatiently to surmise, so numerous
are the military schools in Russia), from all
these gymnasia, teeming with future heroes
burning to be thrashed at future Inkermanns,
have come the keen-eyed, multi-faced, multi-langued
(which is heraldic, though scarcely
Johnsonian, as an epithet) Russians. I have
scratched the Russ thoroughly to-night, and
have found an immense quantity of tartar
beneath his epidermis. Alexis Hardshellovitch
is here, home for the holidays, his head
bigger than ever, and as few brains as ever
inside it. Genghis Khan is here with his
white-kid gloves, his Parisian accent, and his
confounded mare's-milk and black sheepskin
tent countenance. There is, to be brief, a
mob of lads in uniform, to tea this Midsummer
night; the ante-chamber is full of helmets
and cocked-hats, undress caps and swords,
belts and sashes, and marine cadets' dirks;
while the outer atrium or vestibule is a perfect
grove of cloaks with red collars, and grey
capotes with double eagle buttons.

For, the kindest lady in the world is
samovarising, otherwise, entertaining us at
tea to-night in her mansion in the Mala
Millionnaïa — otherwise La petite Millionne —
why million, why little — for it is a much
broader street than Portland Place — I know
not. The windows are all open; and as
there are a good many apartments en suite,
and a good many windows to each, no man
has as yet been suffocated; though the heat
of the day last past was full of promise that
the desirable asphyxiating consummation in
question would occur somewhere or to somebody
before midnight. We have made a
famous tea; and one marine cadet has consumed,
to my knowledge, twelve tumblers-full
of that cheering, but not inebriating beverage.
Alexis Hardshellovitch has overeaten himself
as usual, on raspberries and cream,* and
a professor of natural history in the University
of Moscow— a tremendous savant, but
strangely hail fellow well met with these
school lads — has been cutting thin bread and
butter since ten p.m. The samovar has
grown so hot that it scorches those who
approach it, and blights them like an upas
tree; so the guests give it a wide berth, and
form a circle round it; though the heroic
lady of the house still continues to do battle
with it, at arm's length, and keeps up filling
tumblers of tea and slicing lemons thereinto,
regardless of trouble or expense. There are
so many guests, and they are distributed in
such an eccentric manner, that the two servants
in waiting have long since abandoned
— as a thing impossible of accomplishment —
the practice of handing each visitor his own
particular cup of tea. They come round with
the tray and the tumblers; and the noble
Russians make Cossack forays upon them.
It is every man for himself, and tea for
us all.

Start not, reader, nor, deeming our spirits
fled, think that we are all men-folk in the
suite of apartments in the Mala Millionnaïa,
samovarising on the bounty of the kindest
lady in the world. Besides that good soul,
who has lived for others all the days of her
life, and shall assuredly continue to live for
others when this turbid phantasm is over —
but those others shall be angels for whom
she shall live to be loved by them, and who
will keep time to her cloud-pressing footsteps
with harps of gold — besides the good woman,
we are sanctified, this Midsummer night, by
the presence of wise, and good, and beautiful
women. We have the Queen of Sheba, radiant
in the majesty of her haughty comeliness,
proud, defiant, outwardly, but, ah! so
tender, so loving within — a warrior's cuirass
filled with custard (this is the same
Queen of Sheba you heard about in connection
with the Nevskoï perspective, a late interview,
and a certain gent in a white top-coat);
we have this fair woman, to whom
Minerva stood godmother, but whom Venus
stole away in her infancy, like a gipsy as she
is, to adopt her, practising the trill at an
Erard's grand pianoforte, under the guidance
of the famous St. Peterburgian Italian
music-master Fripanelli (this is not the
etiolated old Fripanelli you wot of in Tattyboy's
rents, but his prosperous brother Benedetto
Fripanelli, who emigrated from the
Lombardo-Veneto kingdom soon after some
carbonari troubles in eighteen hundred and
twenty-two— ostensibly because he was politically
compromised, actually because he
could not gain bread, olives, or rosolio —
nay, not in Milan— nay, not in Bergamo –
nay, not in Venice; and makes his six
thousand roubles per annum in Petersburg
now by persuading princesses that they can
sing.)

The Principle of Evil, if we are to believe
the old legends, suffers, among other deprivations,

* The Russian raspberries are delicious, full-sized, juicy
and luscious, and devoid of that curious furry dryness,
that to me make western raspberries as deceptive and
annoying to the palate as the apples of the Dead Sea. In
England, a raspberry, to my mind, is only to be tolerated
— like the midshipman who was hated by the purser — in a
pie; but in Russia it is a bulb of thirst-allaying delight.
The Russian strawberries, on the other hand, are execrable
— little niminy-piminy, shrunken, weazened
atomies, like number-six shot run to seed and blushing at
their own decrepitude. I have seen hot-house strawberries,
not in the fruit-markets, but in the great Dutch fruiterers'
shops in the Nevskoï. Three roubles, sixteen shillings,
was the moderate price asked for a basket containing
half-a-dozen moderately-sized strawberries.