himself. If your Kibitka, or Tarantasse, or Telega
break down on the road, you holloa out at
the full strength of your lungs for assistance;
whereupon a group of peasants presently
appear crying Sitchasse! (directly!) who mend
your broken trace, or spring, or axle, or re-
shoe your near-wheeler, or heal your drunken
yemstschik's broken head, with a hatchet;—
charging you many roubles for the
accommodation. With a hatchet Peter the Great
commenced the massacre of the Strelitzs;
with a hatchet some say he murdered his
own son; with a hatchet sometimes, even
in these days of grace, the Russian moujik,
maddened by drink and despair, rushes on
the lord who has oppressed him, and with
that murderous tool dashes out his brains.
It puzzles me that the government should
allow the slaves to carry these ugly-looking
weapons constantly in their girdles. I
shouldn't like to offer my serf fifty blows
with a stick when he had an axe in his belt.
I wouldn't have minded trusting Uncle Tom
with a bowie-knife; but I should have kept
my hatchets under lock and key if I had
Sambo, or Quimbo, or Three-fingered Jack
about my property.

It is not only in the use of the hatchet that
the Russian peasant displays extraordinary
dexterity, and power of achieving great
things, with apparently the most contemptible
and inadequate means. There is a well-known
anecdote, which I may be excused
for repeating here, of a Russian peasant,
named Telouchkine, who, some thirty years
since, contracted for the sum of eighty
silver roubles (the materials of course being
found him), to regild the spire, the cross,
and the angel surmounting it, of the cathedral
of St. Peter and St. Paul (the burial-place of
the Czars, from Peter to Nicholas) in the
fortress of Petersburg. He accomplished
this gigantic task without the aid of any
scaffolding or platform work whatsoever,
simply sitting astride on a little saddle
suspended by cords. The spire, from its base
to the summit of the cross, is sixty-five sagènes
or four hundred and fifty-five English feet in
height (455): the cross alone being eight
sagènes or fifty-six feet high. I never heard
the authenticity of this feat disputed. I have
never heard what reward beyond the eighty
roubles contracted for, was bestowed on
Telouchkine. Perhaps his proprietor as a
compliment to his talents increased his yearly
obrok; but I am afraid that when he died,
he did not leave his secret to any one. When
I left St. Petersburg, the angel and cross
in the church in the fortress, had fallen,
as to gilding, into a woeful state of
second-hand looking dinginess. It had become
again a question of regilding these ornaments;
but, this time, no Telouchkine came
forward with an eighty rouble offer. A most
elaborate scaffolding, whose symmetry of
proportions seemed to me quite astonishing,
had been erected round the spire for the use
of the workmen. It had cost, I was told, a
good many thousand roubles, and was to cost
a good many thousand more, before even a
book of gold leaf could be applied to cross,
or angel, or spire.

No man who knows these poor Russian
people with their rude tools, and hands,
seldom disciplined by regular apprenticeship,
can doubt that it is Faith that helps them
along in such works as Telouchkine
accomplished. That strong and blind belief in the
Czar and in the saints, in a material reward
from St. Peter and St. Paul, St. Sergius or
St. George, St. Wladimir or St. Nicholas, in
the shape of heaven-sent roubles, or a dupe
sent by the saints in their way to swindle, or
a cash-box for them to steal (without the
possibility of detection), or a miraculous
softening of their master's hearts, and their
exemption from the Stick for years; together
with a certain hope and trust that for this
good deed done to the Saints and the Czar,
they will be rewarded with a real golden
crown, a real white robe, a real harp, a real
cloud to sit upon, to all eternity, while the
Barynn, the Starosta, and the Bourmister,
go to the devil, to be beaten to pieces
by Gospodin Schrapschin (Lord Beelzebub),
and burnt to cinders by Gospodin Tchort
(Lord Lucifer: the Russians are very polite
to their devils, and give them titles of
honour). This strong belief leads men like
Telouchkine to swing four hundred feet high
on six inches of wood hung to a hempen cord;
it led the moujiks who built up the Winter
Palace in eleven months, and perished by
thousands building it, to work, cheerfully,
patiently, enthusiastically, in the broiling sun
and the icy blast, because it was the Lord,
the Czar's house, and because the government
had caused it to be given out, that the
works had been blessed by an angel; it led
the gaunt grey-coated men in the flat caps to
fight, and stand and march, and charge, and
starve and die, uncomplainingly, unyieldingly,
heroically, on the heights of Alma and in the
valley of Inkermann, in casemates full of blood
and smoke; in hospitals, where the wounded
could not lie for the dead that were a-top of
them; on bone-covered steppes, in pestilential
marshes; on muddy tongues of ooze, and
weed, and treacherous sand, that skirt the
Putrid Sea.

Are not these all Iks?—for what is the
Coldatt, the soldier, but a shaven moujik—
and have I been digressing? I know, though,
these Iks are not those I left on the
bridge. There is another Ik. Big beard,
red face, but all the rest as white and floury,
as the mason is grey. This is a boulotchnik,
or baker—a journeyman baker, mind; for
were he a master, he would not be a Russian
or a serf at all, but a free German. For a
wonder, he is not booted, but wears a pair of
coarse canvas trousers, and drab list slippers.
You must not confound him with that bow-
legged industrial, clad also from head to foot