editions of that Book which will be Reviewed
some day; but, of bouncing, bawling,
buoyant, bothering, delightful children, there
are none to be found here. It makes one
shudder here to see the small tots of
humanity, who only knew your ankles
yesterday, and are scarcely tall enough
to be on speaking terms with your
kneecaps even now, conversing gravely in
two or three languages, and bowing, and
scraping, and lifting their caps, and
unbuckling their sword-belts, as though, good
Lord! as though they had been bandied
about, and worn, and punched, and bitten,
as often as a George the Third sixpence,
instead of being silver pennies, bright, sharp,
fresh, new from Nature's mint. The babies
here, too—the very babies in arms—frown
sternly on you as they pass by, or solve
mathematical problems on their nurses'
arms, with their limp tiny fingers, biting
their lips thoughtfully the while.* These
precocious civil and military functionaries,
incipient diplomatists, sprouting philosophers,
conquerors—what need have they of a milk
diet! Babies though they be, they require
strong meat. Give them their bird, let them
crack their bottle, light their pipes, lace them
the tightest of corsets, hand them the daintiest
of fans, for they are grown up, before they are
grown at all.

* Whenever I go into a strange country I set myself
sedulously to work to discover (and this you may perhaps
have already inferred) something like a national and
picturesque costume. Generally I am disappointed, and
find nothing but prosaic hats and coats, bonnets and
shawls, black cotton stockings, and linsey woolsey
petticoats. I experienced great delight, however, and
thought I had at last found a land of handsome
dresses, when, walking the streets during my nonage
in Petersburg, I lighted upon divers females, generally
ruddy, comely often, and clad in the same description of
gala costume I have attempted to describe in the
holiday dress of the "Baba." The most plainly attired
had sarafannes or tunics of crimson silk edged with
broad gold lace, embroidered shoes, petticoats of rich
stuff, necklaces, massive gold earrings, and kakoschuiks
glistening with sham jewels and seed-pearls. They
invariably had small Russians with them, either in arms
or toddling by their sides; and I conjectured them to
be wives of wealthy native merchants; but I was very
soon afterwards, and to my extreme disappointment,
Informed that they were WET-NURSES; and that this
masquerade costume was worn by them as a matter
of course, and with as little picturesque truth as John
Thomas wears the maroon plush and chrome yellow
aiguillettes of the Countess of Squllpington. These wet-
nurses are usually from Southern Russia. (They say
no babies can live that are nursed by women from the
marshy Government of St. Petersburg.) Not one in five
hundred of them is married. They have a child, and
cast it into the Foundling Hospital, get a certificate of
health from a doctor, and become wet-nurses in noble
families. It is a profession. It is a paying one. A
discontented Sloujanka (if she be not a serf) will say,
"This does not suit me; I cannot support the Barynia.
I shall go and be a wet-nurse."

Whoever drinks the milk, there are plenty
of Laitières and Crêmières in the capital.
They have a quarter to themselves too, not
exactly in St. Petersburg, but on the other
side of the water, in the village of Okhta,
where they dwell among their pots and keep
their cows. The Petersburg milk-women are,
I believe, mainly the property of that colossal
slave proprietor (he has a hundred thousand
they say) Count Tcherémétieff. SUCH cows,
too, the milk-women have! You may frequently
see them being led about the streets,
gaunt, bony, woebegone little brutes, and I
declare not one whit bigger than Shetland
ponies. Or perhaps, indeed, Shetland cows,
if the cattle of the Ultima Thule are as
diminutive as their horses. It is only very
early in the morning that cattle or sheep are
seen about the streets; they are then mostly
on their way to Wassily-Ostrow, where are
the slaughter-houses and the majority of
the summer butchers' shops. I see, still
rattling along in this early late droschky of
mine (the Ischvostchik has not, probably, been
to bed for a week, but is considerably fresher
than I am), multitudes of horned beasts and
sheep, yet for all their numbers, only speckling
the vastness of the open, coming adown the
great street from the Smolnoï road, along the
quays, across the Pont-Neuf or Novi-Most, and
so on to their doom to be made meat of. The
sheep, albeit somewhat longer-wooled, are
much like ours; they are not ruddled, but
appear to be branded with a curious cross
within a circle, and a distinguishing letter, on
the left flank. I wonder they don't stamp
them with the double eagle! The pigs are
truculent evil-eyed animals enough, with
gashed-snouts and switch-tails. Observing
the remarkable bright russet hue of some of
these porcine Russians, I can for once
acknowledge as a truth that legend which in my
scepticism I had hitherto been led to rank, as
fabulous, with Guy Earl of Warwick's Dun
Cow, and More of More Hall's Wantley
Dragon. The sheep (in Russia) are driven
by moujiks, clothed in touloupes or loose
leathern coats, which with an utter disregard
of delicacy and consideration for the feelings
of the animals themselves are evidently made
of sheepskin. Their legs are swathed in
criss-cross bandages of leather or bark, much
resembling the cruciform-leggings worn by
Mr. James Wallack in the melo-drama of the
Brigand, These Corydons wield the instrument
we so often read about, and so seldom
see, the real shepherd's crook—not the long
pole with a squeezed-up hook, which the
Sussex pastors carry, but exactly resembling
a bishop's crosier. The shepherds have no
collies—no dogs to worry the sheep, or keep
them together; their crook serves them for
all in all; and they possess a peculiar agility
in intertwining the hook with the woolly locks
of the sheep's fleece, and then, dexterously
reversing the instrument, driving the end of
the staff (sharpened and shod with iron) into
his ribs in a manner calculated to cause great
agony to the mutton, but highly conducive to
discipline and good order. The pig-drivers
have Cossack whips, with thongs about six
times as large as the staff, with a little
perforated ball of lead, strung, which runs up
and down the lash, so that the pig is sure to
have it somewhere. This whip makes, when
cracked, a tremendous noise; and from the