Mr. Conductor, I have set down my case
as judicially and temperately as I can, and
now I ask you what am I to do? or what is
any man to do who is in a position similar to
mine? I have removed for a time to Lausanne,
because political commotion disturbs
the easy tenor of my life, and commissioners
of police are less agreeable even than those
commissioners against whom this complaint
is laid. Shall I stay at Lausanne and be a
hermit?

A JOURNEY DUE NORTH.

THE IKS.

THE title of this paper may seem exceedingly
absurd. But there are many Iks and
Chiks and Niks in Russland, whom it
behoves to have information about.

In the Nevskoï—the great avenue of the
Tents of Kedar l am so strangely constrained
to dwell amongst and in its immediate ducts,
the Great and Little Morskaïas—you will see
panorama-passing during the day, all the Iks
worth noticing. In these streets only will
you be able to view anything approaching to
the Johnsonian or Fleet Street aspect of City
Life. Away from the Nevskoï and the
Morskaïas, the vast streets of Petersburg
are, at all seasons, little better than deserts.
Solitary figures of slaves and soldiers glide
by occasionally, ghost-like; but, on Quay or
Esplanade, in Oulitza, Perspective, Ploschad,
or Pereoulok, there is (as I have hinted in
the Tchornï-Narod,) nor throng nor pressure
—and I have seen, at high-noon, standing in
the centre of the Admiralty Square, one dog:
a mangy cur with a ridiculous tail—who, in
the insolence of undisputed possession, set
his four paws all wide apart, and, wagging
that truncated handle of his, barked shrilly
and scornfully at the high palaces, as though
they had been the walls of Balclutha, and he
was delighted that they were desolate.

Very slowly, but with crustaceous tenacity,
has the Nevskoï in its ways, its ins and outs,
and its Iks, fixed itself upon me. It was
shy and coy at first. Let me, as briefly as
I may, essay to go round the clock with
you on the Nevskoï, and trot out the Iks,
in their morning as well as evening aspects.
Remember, this is summer time; the
beginning of July; (for I know nothing of
Acris Hyems in Russia); and take note, if
you please, that the time is four o'clock in
the morning.

I am not at all ashamed to say that I have
been out all night—at least all the time
usually set apart in civilised countries for
that appalling season of existence—at a ball,
and that I am rattling home behind an
Ischvostchik from the seventeenth line at Wassily-
Ostrow; and, though wrapped in a thick overcoat,
shivering with cold. The sun is manifest
enough and bright enough in all conscience,
and the smiling morn (smiling a polite,
heartless, soulless, Sheffield plate, thoroughly
Muscovite smile) is busily employed in tipping
the gaudy domes with a brighter lustre
than their gold leaf gives them. Not a shop,
above ground, is open as yet—the aristocratic
Boutiquiers of the Nevskoï are as late risers
as their customers—but, in the basement,
there are plenty of small "Lavkas"—grocery,
chandlery, and bakery shops open: to say
nought of the vodki-dens with the great
bunches of grapes in gold leaf suspended
over their portals, to show, I presume, that
wine is not sold there—which dram
establishments never seem to be closed at all.
The water-carts go heavily lumbering past;
then I hear a clanking as of many tin-pots,
or of marrowbone and cleaver music, in
which the metal unduly preponderates; and
see advancing towards me a gaunt, bony,
ill-favoured woman in a striped petticoat held
up by the usual braces, the usual full-sleeved
innermost garments, a crimson handkerchief
tied over her freckled face, and streaming
behind, like a Bedouin's burnouse when the
capuchin is thrown suddenly back from the
head. Over each shoulder she carries a heavy
arc of wood, like a fully bent bow, but hollowed
out in the centre so as to fit her shoulder,
and serve as a yoke; to either end of which
are suspended fasciculi of the before
mentioned tin-pots, much battered, and with
brazen lids and spouts. This is a milk-woman.
She does not deliver the caseous
beverage from house to house, as with us,
but takes her stand at some patented spot—
generally at the "Auge" or feeding-trough
of a droschky-stand. There are no such things
as nosebags in the cabbicular hierarchy in
this country; and, by a most humane provision,
the animals are rendered independent
of the caprice, or cruelty, or stinginess of
their drivers, and are fed under police
superintendence at the public auges or troughs, to
whose support all the Ischvostchiks contribute
their quota at stated times and in abundance.
She either stands at one of these or close to
the cabane or wooden hut of a Boutotsnik.
Hither come either the dvorniks (yard-men),
or the slough (man-servants), or the sloujanka
(maid-servants), to lay in the stock of milk
for the day. What the Petersburgers, who
are not Tartars (for these live almost
entirely upon milk) can want with milk, I am
puzzled to discover. They almost uniformly
drink black coffee after dinner, and seldom
indulge in that beverage for breakfast (the
rich prefer champagne and Lafitte; the poor,
quass or vodki); they drink their tea without
milk in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred.
I never saw any remarkable profusion
of custards or ice-creams at Russian dinner-
tables; and it is my firm impression that
there are no children in St. Petersburg to
drink it. There are little men and women,
little cadets, little grand-dukes, small
Tchinovniks, miniature policemen, Lilliputian
admirals, infinitesimal Archimandrites and
Protopopes, minified countesses, minute
coquettes; diamond, ruby, and pearl