uncreasiness, that it might have shone to
advantage at a Sunday-school revival — nay,
might have been thought not unworthy to
gleam with a sanctified shimmer on the platform
of Exeter Hall the Great, Itself. He
held his reins delicately, and dallied with
them digitally, more as though he were playing
on the harpsichords than guiding a vicious
horse. Behind, this grand-ducal-droschky-looking
charioteer, there sat a stout man with
a stouter, flabbier, and very pale and
unwholesome-looking visage. It was the
reverse of good to see those pendant cheeks of
his, gelatinising over the choking collar of his
uniform. Moreover, he wore gold-rimmed
spectacles; moreover, his shiny black hair was
cropped close to his head, much more in a
recently-discharged English ticket-of-leave than
in a Russian and military fashion; mostover,
he had not a vestige of moustache about him;
and this last circumstance, combined with a
tiny equilateral triangle of turn-down collar
that asserted itself over each side of his stock
below where his cheeks were wagging, puzzled
me mightily, mingling as both together did
a dash of the civil with the military element
in him. For, as to the rest of his attire he
was all martial— coat buttoned up to here,
spiked and double-eagled helmet, grey capote,
buckskin gloves, and patent-leather boots.
Could this be the Czar himself? I asked myself.
I had heard of the studiously unostentatious
manner in which the autocrat perambulates
the streets of his capital; but then
I knew also from the columns of that morning's
Journal de St. Petersbourg that the
Gossudar was at Revel, indulging in the
innocent delights of sea-bathing with his
wife and family. Who could this be— the
governor of St. Petersburg? Count Nesselrode?
Say.

Let me here remark that the Russians, who
are the cutest sophists, if not the closest
reasoners, to be found in a long life's march,
frequently allude with exulting complacency
to the quiet, modest, and on-his-people-confiding
manner in which the emperor goes
about. "We have no walking on jealously-guarded
slopes in Russia," they say; "our
emperor takes his morning walk from nine
to ten on the Quay de la Cour, in front of
the Winter Palace, where the poorest moujik
or gondola boatman can salute him. We
have no barouches-and-four, no glass coaches
with cuirassiers riding with cocked pistols
at the windows, or escorts of Cent Gardes, or
hussars, or lancers following behind. We have
not even outriders or equerries— nay, not a
single footman nor groom. The Czar is
driven about in a one-horse chay, an
Ischvostchik to drive him, just as you may have
one, only a little dirtier, for your five-and-twenty
copecks; and that is all. Our Czar's
escort is in the people he loves so well; his
greatest safeguard is in their unalterable
veneration and affection for him." Unto
such Russians I have ordinarily answered,
True, O king! but what needs your master
with an escort when St. Petersburg is one
huge barrack, or rather one huge police
station? What need of Cent Gardes when
there are thousands of police guards walking
within the Czar's droschky-sight on the
Nevskoï? What need has a keeper to be
afraid of a fierce bear, when the beast is
muzzled, and chained, and shackled to the
floor of his den, and barred in besides?

I had with me on this occasion a companion
of the Russian ilk, and made bold to ask that
Muscovite who this grey-capoted unmoustachioed
apparition in the handsome droschky
might be. I must explain that I was very
young to Russia at this time— a month's
longer residence would have made me
wondrously uniform wise; for, being necessarily
and constantly in contact with persons wearing
some uniform garb or other, a man must
needs grow learned in buttons, and facings
and coat-cuts, and sword-hilts, and can nose
a guardsman or a lineman on the Nevskoï
by what is nautically— and perhaps naughtily
— expressed as the cut of his jib, as easily as
Polonius was said to be susceptible of nasal
detection by the Danish gentleman who saw
the ghost, and used bad language to his
mother.

The Russian to whom I addressed this
query responded, first by the usual shrug,
next by the usual smile, and lastly by the
inevitable Russian counter-query:

"Do you mean to say you don't know?"

"I have not the slightest notion. A field-marshal?
Prince Gortschakoff? General
Todtleben?"

"My dear fellow, that is a major of police."

"His pay must be something enormous
then, or his private fortune must be very
handsome," I ventured to remark; "he being
able to drive so elegant an equipage as the
one we have just seen."

"That dog's son," the Russian answered
leisurely, "has not a penny of his own in the
world, and his full pay and allowances may
amount, at the very outside, to about two
hundred and fifty roubles a-year" (forty
pounds).

"But whence the private droschky, the
Alézan horse, the silver-mounted harness,
the luxury of the whole turn-out?" I asked.

"II prend" (he takes), the Russian
answered very coolly; whereupon, as by this
time we had arrived at the corner of the
Great Morskaïa, he deigned to descend from
the vehicle, and, leaving me to pay the
Ischvostchik, he went on his way, and I saw him
no more till dinner-time.

Which is so much of the apologue I have
to tell concerning my first definite notions of
the Russian police.

The Russian Boguey, like the police system
of most despotic countries, is divided into
two great sections— the judicial or public,
and the political or secret. As I purpose to
tell all I know anent both these peculiarly