drawn up in line against a wall, standing on their hindlegs with their fore-feet extended above their heads, in an attitude of exhortation.

Among the poultry and game, the hares are especially remarkable, from the fact that their fur, which through the summer is either brown or gray, has at the approach of winter turned completely white; a provision of nature which enables the Russian and Siberian hare to travel through the snow in quest of food with a certain amount of impunity, though for all that it never fails to be represented at the winter-markets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. The partridges, quails, grouse, heath-cocks, wood-hens, &c., are lying together in a frozen mass; and by their side are the ducks and geese, with outstretched necks, so straight and stiff that you might take one of these harmless birds by the bill, and, using it as a bludgeon, knock your enemy down with the body. The fowls have been plucked, plunged into water, and left to freeze. Thus they are completely encased in ice, and in that condition will keep for any time. And to think that Newton wished to satisfy himself by experiment that fowls could be so preserved, and that the experiment cost him his life! What would a moujik think of such a philosopher?

Besides game of every kind, not only from the neighbouring governments, but even from Finland and Siberia, the markets of St. Petersburg. and Moscow are supplied with fish from every sea and river in the empire. Lomonossof, the earliest Russian poet, the author of the first Russian dictionary, and one of the most celebrated chemists and natural philosophers the country ever produced, made his first appearance in St. Petersburg with a sledge-load of fish from the White Sea, where his father gained his living as a fisherman. The Black Sea and the Caspian also contribute largely. The Don sends its sturgeons, after the roe has been duly extracted for the purpose of making caviar; and the Volga its rich, oily, yellow-fleshed sterlet, invaluable for fish-soup. The pre

sence of the sterlet is the more welcome in the wintermarkets from the fact that this delicately-organized and exquisitely-flavoured fish will only live in the water of the Volga. But in winter there is no necessity for it to live at all after it has once been caught, as it can be conveyed in its frozen state to the extremities of the empire without losing any of its freshness, or any very perceptible amount of its taste.

The mode of catching fish in the winter is simple enough. A hole is made in the ice, and the fish rush to it for the sake of the air. Then, in the case of the sturgeons of the Don, the Cossacks "of that ilk" harpoon them; while elsewhere the smaller fish, equally in want of air, precipitate themselves into the nets that await them, and thus get, if not out of the frying-pan into the fire, at least out of the ice into the frying pan.

Another peculiarity of the Frozen Market is, that it takes place in the middle of an improvised wood,—a wood which suggests the forest in "Macbeth," and which is composed entirely of evergreens for Christmas-trees. Beneath the shade of this portable thicket are sold brooms, wooden spades for clearing away the snow from before the houses, and the hand-sledges in which servants and shopmen draw their parcels through the streets; for it would be out of the question to carry anything at all heavy or cumbersome when by such simple means it may be pulled with ease along the slippery pavement.

Nor must I forget the itinerant vendors of suckingpigs, who start from the Frozen Market with whole litters of the interesting little animals, not much larger than guinea-pigs, hanging from their necks and waists; nor the dealers in dried mushrooms, who string those leathern delicacies together like pieces of brown paper on the tail of a kite, and wear them in garlands about their sheepskinned persons. A similar kind of pedlar is to be found in the man who is hung all over with chains and rings of thin whity-brown bread,-doubtless a friend

His friend the advertiser carries on his back the portrait of Miss Julia Pastrana, who was

to the owner of the tumbler and tea-urn who walks about the commercial quarter and sells hot tea to the bearded and caftaned merchants.

I have said that it is not until the Nikolsky Maros, or Frost of St. Nicholas, that the sledges fly through the streets in all their glory. By that time the rich "boyars”” (as foreigners persist in styling the Russian noblemen of the present day) have arrived from their estates, and the poor peasants, who have long ceased to till the ground, and have now thrashed all the corn, begin to come in from theirs; for, humble and dependent as he may be, each peasant has nevertheless his own patch of land. For the former are the elegant sledges of polished nutwood, with rugs of soft thick fur to protect the legs of the occupants; whose drivers, in their green caftans fastened round the waist with red sashes, and in their square thickly-wadded caps of crimson velvet, like sofa-cushions, urge on the prodigiously fast trotting horses, at the same time throwing themselves back in their seats with outstretched arms and tightened reins, as though the animals were madly endeavouring to escape from their control. The latter bring with them certain strongly-made wooden boxes, with a seat at the back for two passengers and a perch in front for a driver. These boxes are put upon rails, and called sledges. The bottom of each box (or sledge) is plentifully strewn with hay, which after a few days becomes converted, by means of snow and dirty goloshes, into something very like manure. The driver is immediately in front of you, with his brass badge hanging on his back like the label on a box of sardines. He wears a sheepskin; but it is notorious that after ten years' wear the sheepskin loses its odour, besides which it is winter, so that your sense of smell has really nothing to fear. The one thing necessary is to keep your legs to yourself, or at all events not to obtrude them beneath the perch of the driver, or you will run

• It would be equally correct to speak of the English nobility of the present day as "the barons."