appearances, the authorities, instead of
harnessing to a fire-engine a team of fighting,
kicking droschky horses, unapproachable for
tearing over the stones and stopping at
nothing, provide huge, showy, clumsy brutes,
whose breed appears to hover between that
of an overfed mourning-coach horse, and a
Suffolk Punch grown out of all stable knowledge.
The Russians brag — as they do, indeed,
about most things— of the tremendous pace
these horses are up to; but, I have seen
them out, over and over again, when the
cry of "Agôn!" (fire) has arisen, and
there has been a conflagration somewhere.
Where wheels and hoofs have assuredly the
best chance, on the smooth wooden pavement
of the Nevskoï, they go at a tolerable rate;
but, elsewhere their performances are, in my
humble opinion, contemptible. Much clattering,
much flint and steel pyrotechnics between
horse-shoes and pavement, much smacking of
serpentine whips, much rattling of wheels,
much yelling from mounted police-soldiers to
moujiks and Ischvostchiks to get out of the
way, much knocking down of those unhappy
souls if they are tardy in doing so; but, of
real speed— of that lightning flashing of
locomotion which we, in London, are dazed
with when the scarlet fire-annihilator with
its brave band of life-savers is seen for a
moment in the eyes' field— there is positively none.
The Russian firemen are very brave; that
is, they will stand on a roof till it tumbles
into the flames, calmly holding the hose in
their hands, unless they are ordered to come
down; that is, they will walk gravely up a
blazing staircase, at the word of command,
into a blazing drawing-room to seek for a
birdcage or a lady's fan. They are especially
great in standing to be burnt, because they
have been posted at certain spots; and
scarcely a fire occurs in St. Petersburg without
one or more lives being sacrificed through
this stolid, stupid, inert bravery of the firemen.

Loitering listlessly on the threshold of the
grim Police Siège (and a man may do worse
than loiter and look before he leaps into
that Cave of Trophonius), I fell into a strange
reverie, gazing up at those two impassible
grey-coated sentinels in the watch-tower's
balcony. I am no longer Due North in
Russia: I am North, among the mountains
of Cumberland, and somebody has sent
me a letter. It is full of news about Jones,
Brown and Robinson at a place I love. It
tells me how Miss Myrtle, who has been
going to be married so long, is married at
last; how Tom Daffy has taken orders, and
Jack Edwards has taken to drinking; how
my old schoolmaster has gone to Australia,
and my old sweetheart has gone dead. But,
there is a remarkable paragraph that
interests me, above all things, and, I know not
why, fills me with a strange feeling of envy.
I have asked for news of two friends,
and I am told they are leading bachelor
lives, enjoying themselves upon hot roast
goose and whisky punch! Heavens!
what a life! Is it not the summum
bonum of human felicity! What could a
man desire more? To live on hot roast
goose— hot, mind!— with whisky punch (hot
also, I will be bound) à discretion.
Mahomet's paradise, Gulchenrouz's abode that
we read of in Vathek, the Elysian Fields,
Fiddler's Green, all the 'baccy in the
world and more 'baccy, an opium-eater's
most transcendant trance— none of these
states of beatitude surely could compare
with the goose and the punch condition of
happiness. And, with this silly theorem
still running in my mind, I find myself still
gazing, gazing moonwards, and to where
the sentinels are watching, and still find
myself repeating, what a life! what a life!
till a vagrant shaft of thought from the
hot goose and punch quiver, flies straight
to one of those grey-coated targets of
watchers, and hits him in the bull's-eye
or the button-hole; and, still repeating
what a life! I run off at a tangent
of reverie when I think what a life his
must be!

If they were to put a musket and bayonet
into your hands, and bid you walk up and
down before a door for two hours; if they
were to clap me a-top of the Monument, and
bid me look out, and note if between
Shooters' Hill and Hampstead Heath there
happened to be a house on fire; would not
you and I go mad? I am sure I should.
Suppose yonder grey-coat, or this slow-pacing
grenadier to be a man god-gifted with imagination,
with impulses; suppose him to have
any human passion or scintillation of human
thought in him; and reconcile this, if you
can, with his watching or keeping guard,
without casting himself from the tower,
without attempting to swallow the contents
of his cartouch-box, or balancing his musket
and bayonet on the tip of his nose, or howling
forth comic songs, or essaying the Frog hornpipe!
You will say that it is habit, that it is
that use which is our second nature that
makes him go through this weary pilgrimage
quietly and uncomplainingly. Are there not
lighthouse guardians, omnibus time-keepers,
men who watch furnace fires? It may be so:
we are as glib, I opine, in talking of habit in
men, as we are in talking of instinct in
animals; but, I say again, what a life! what
a life! And suddenly remembering that I
promised, in the outset of this paper, not to
digress, nay vowed— rashly, I am afraid, like
Jephtha— and have already broken my vow, I
hurry away from the octagonal watch-tower,
its silent watchers remaining as mysterious to
me as the Sphinx.

Two more grey-coated men, but with helmets
(the watchers on the tower wear flat
caps like exaggerated muffins), who are
cracking nuts lazily at the ever-yawning
doorway of the Siège, point out the entrance
to that abode of misery. Straight from the