of their French jargon had nothing in com- sian Princes; and these Russian Princes mon with the song of birds.

All went on in the accustomed way. The orchestra in the pavilion played now a potpourri from Verdi's Traviata, now a waltz from Strauss, or the " Say to him," a popular Russian air prepared for the instruments by the all-too obliging leader of the band. Around the green tables in the gamblinghalls, crowded the same faces, with the same stupefied, distracted, money-thirsty, almost blood-thirsty expression, with that thievish look which the gambling-fever brings out even on most aristocratic features. There was to be seen the same nobleman from Tambof, fat, richly and tastelessly dressed, continually and violently excited, (as his deccased father had been when he whipped his serfs); his eyes starting from their sockets, his body bent half-way over the table, yet never noticing the cool smile of the Croupier as he announced that that round of the game was closed; in his excitement taking no part and thus destroying for himself all possibility of winning, however favorable fortune might have been to him; yet this did not prevent him in the evening from repeating, with the most resigned indignation,the words of Prince Coco, one of the most renowned leaders of the Opposition Nobles; that Prince Coco, who in Paris in the saloon of Princess Mathilde, in the Emperor's presence, had said, Madame, the principle of Property is deeply shaken in Russia!" Around the "Russian Tree” (l'arbre russe) assembled our beloved country people of both sexes; they stepped up to each other with dignity, with a stately negligence, addressing one another with an expression full of loftiness, grace and freedom, as beseems beings on the highest step of the social ladder; hardly were they seated, when they no longer knew about what they should converse; and spent the time, passing from emptiness to nothingness, and then the reverse; or in laughter over the stale, and not very elegant, but extremely flat witticisms of a Parisian ex-literati, a chatterer and a buffoon, with a miserable little goatee on his chin and miserable shoes on his large, flat feet. Charivari, Tintamarre, and allpossible Almanache* might produce the platitudes which this joker set before these Rus

46

Humoristic newspapers in the European capitals.

broke out in grateful laughter, involuntarily acknowledging the superiority of foreign genius, as well as their own perfect incapacity of inventing anything at all diverting.

Yet here was to be found the very quintessence of Russian society, in the most exquisite specimens. There was Count X., our incomparable dilettante a deeply musical nature-who so divinely reproduces for us the Romanzas, although he can only perform with one finger, and his singing is a medium between the style of a gipsy and the tricks of a Parisian hair-dresser, visiting the comic Opera. There was our irresistible Baron Z., who can do everything - he, the author and public administrator, the orator and fine Greek scholar. There was Prince Y., the friend of religion and the people, who, in the happy time of the brandy monopoly, made a colossal fortune by manufacturing brandy from belladonna. There was the brilliant General O., who had conquered some one, had overthrown some place, yet now did not know what to do with himself, or how to stand on his own feet. There was P., a ridiculous, honest fellow, who imagined himself to be very sickly and very intelligent, although he was as strong as an ox and as stupid as a log; he held faithfully to the traditions of the epoch of the Lermontof romance, “A hero of our century;" he paid attention to the rules of deportment, the custom of walking on the heels with affected slowness; giving to his face with its unbending, vexed look the expression of a sleepy pride; cutting people short in conversation with a yawn; laughing through his nose; attentively observing his fingers and nails; suddenly pushing his hat from his neck forward over his eyebrows and vice versa. There were statesmen, diplomats of European reputation, men of counsel and of great experience, who had very confused ideas of the Pope and his golden bulls, and who think the poor-tax is a tax which the poor must pay. There were finally enthusiastic, though bashful, adorers of the lorettes; young lions with hair carefully parted down the back of the skull to the neck; with whiskers which fell to their shoulders, who tolerated nothing on their bodies which did not come from London. Judging by outward appearances,

they possessed everything with which to rival the Parisian buffoon; yet the Russian ladies would have nothing to do with them, even the Countess Z., the recognized mistress of this great genus, called by evil tongues "the queen of the wasps and the Medusa in nightcap," preferred, in the absence of the buffoon, the Italian, the Moldavian, the American spiritualists, the secretaries of foreign ambassadors, cr even the young German Barons with the sweet, usurious faces, around whom they fluttered like butterflies. Around these great stars, revolved the Princess Babette, the same in whose arms Chopin died (we are told of thousands of ladies in Europe who had this honor); Princess Annette whom no one could have ever resisted, had not, like a sudden odor of cabbage in the midst of sweet perfumes, the coarse village washerwoman made its appearance; Princess Pachette, little favored by fortune; finally the excitable Miss Zizi and the lachrymose Miss Zozo; these all turned away from their countrymen and treated them most unmercifully. Let us leave these bewitching ladies on one side, and turn away from the renowned "tree" under whose shadow are displayed toilets, in which the tastelessness is still greater than the extravagance, and may heaven relieve them of the ennui which gnaws them.

the world. It was as if he rested after long labor, and as if the picture which unrolled itself before his eyes, gave him so much the greater pleasure, as his thoughts and actions had been accustomed to move in an entirely different sphere.

He was a Russian, named Gregory Litwinof. His acquaintance is necessary to us, and we must therefore say something about his rather tame past. Son of an inferior civil officer belonging to the merchant's class, he grew up in a village. His mother, of noble descent, was good, eccentric, and not without strength of character; twenty years younger than her husband, she completed, so far as it lay in her power, the education of her son; saved him from a lounging, official life, soothed and softened his coarse, rough nature. She effected thus much; he at last dressed himself neatly, conducted himself respectably, abstained from profanity, and began to prize knowledge and learned men, although, as will be well understood, it never occurred to him to take a book in his hand. He also conquered himself so far, that he ran a little less fast, and conversed in a languid voice on higher subjects which gave him no little trouble. Many times the old Adam broke through, and he muttered between his teeth, as some one bored him, "Oh, if I could thoroughly thrash him!" but added aloud, "Yes; to be sure, the subject is worth considering." The mother of Litwinof had A few steps from the "Russian Tree," at arranged her house in European style; he a little table in front of the Café Weber, sat never addressed her servants with the cusa man about thirty years of age, of medium tomary "thou," and at her table no one size, slender, sunburnt, with agreeable, and dared gulp his food voraciously down. Neithat the same time manly features. With both er she nor her husband knew how to manhands supported on his cane, he sat there, age their estate; it was much neglected, but quiet, like one to whose thoughts it never was of great extent, consisting of meadows, comes that others are observing him or em- woods, and a lake, on whose banks a factory ploying themselves concerning him. His had once stood. This had been built by a large, brown, expressive eyes wandered more zealous than experienced nobleman slowly over men and objects; now they closed, it flourished in the hands of a shrewd Rusdazzled by the sunshine; then again followed sian merchant, and decayed after passing some remarkable appearance, which called into the possession of an honest German. forth a quick, almost childish smile on the For Madame Litwinof it was enough that lips under the fine mustachios. He wore a she did not ruin herself and made no debts. cloak of German make, and a gray felt hat Unfortunately she had not good health, and covered half his broad forehead. At first died in consumption the same year in which sight, he made the impression of a respecta- her son removed to the University of Mosble, active young man who did not under- COW. Circumstances which the reader will rate himself, as one finds many of the kind in | learn later, prevented Litwinof's finishing his

II.

studies; he returned to the Province, where | better or worse.' She agreed to do so, and he hastened to Carlsruhe to collect his books and papers. But why, it will be asked, why is he yet in Baden?

he continued to vegetate for some time without occupation, without connections, almost without acquaintances. Among the nobility of the district he met with few kindly advances. Less impressed with the Occidental theory of the evils of absenteeism than with the truth of their old Oriental maxim "that to a man nothing stands nearer than his shirt," they enrolled him by force among the patriotic volunteers of 1855. Litwinof came near dying of typhus fever in the Crimea, where without seeing the face of one single "allied soldier ;" he spent six months in a mud-hut on the swampy shores of the Azof Sea; he was afterwards invested with one of the elective offices in his Province, in which he was not spared "the disagreeables" connected with it; living always in the country he became at last passionately fond of farming. Conceiving that the estate of his mother, badly managed by his old father, did not produce the tenth part of what it might in more skillful hands, he also perceived that he himself was wanting in experience, and finally went on a journey in order to study earnestly farming and technology. He passed nearly four years away from home, in Mecklenberg, in Silesia, in Hohenheim, in Carlsruhe; he visited Belgium and England, worked conscientiously and gained much knowledge. All this was not easy for him, but he wished to make the trial to the very utmost, and now, sure of himself, of his future, and of the benefit which he could bring to his fellow-citizens and-who can tell-perhaps to his whole country, he was just ready to return to his inheritance, to which also he was continually and unceasingly recalled by his father, whose ideas had been entirely overturned by the freeing of the serfs and the regulations in connection with this act. But why did he halt here in Baden ?

He is in Baden, because day after day he awaits there his cousin and betrothed, Tatiana Tschestof. He has known her from childhood and spent the last summer with her in Dresden, where she had settled herself with her aunt. He honestly loved this young relative and esteemed her thoroughly; on the point of closing his preparatory labors, and ready to begin a new career, he asked her if she would unite her fate with his "for VOL. XLI.-2

Because Tatiana's aunt, Capitolina Tschestof, a fifty-five years old maiden lady, eccentric, almost ridiculous, but good and faithful even to self-sacrifice, democratic in principles, the sworn enemy of the great world and the aristocracy, because that aunt could not withstand the temptation of casting a look, for once at least in her life, on this same great world, at such an elegant centre of union as Baden. Capitolina never wore crinoline; her gray hair was cut short in her neck; luxury and splendor made her inwardly indig. nant, and it was therefore so much the more beneficial to express aloud her contempt for all these trifles. Why should not this pleasure be afforded the good old lady?

Therefore was Litwinof so quiet and looked around with so much security. His life lay open before him without an obstacle in the way; his destiny was traced out for him;. and of this destiny, which he could regard as his own creation, he was as proud as he was. happy.

III.

"Bah, bah, bah! there he is surely," screamed suddenly a harsh voice in his ear, while a heavy hand clapped him on the shoulder. He raised his head; it was one of his few Moscow acquaintances, a certain Bambajef, a good fellow, that is to say, a nothing. Already past the meridian of life, he had yet as soft cheeks and nose as if they had been boiled, greasy, rumpled hair, fat and flabby body. Always without a groshen, always enthusiastic about something, Rostislaf Bambajef marched without aim, but not without noise, over the broad surface of our forbearing common mother, the earth.

"This I call a coincidence," repeated he, opening wide his swollen eyes and protruding his thick lips, over which a miserable, little, dyed moustache bristled in the air. "So it is in Baden. Everything meets there. What brings you here?"

"I have been here these four days."
"Where do you come from?"
"What does that concern you?"

"What does that concern me? Listen

"What kind of a work? Upon what?" ing towards the coffee-house, beckoned to asked Litwinof.