Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

in all Russia, is clean linen. I carry my bed with me, but I cannot burden myself with much store of bed-clothes; and the table-cloths which they give me at the post-houses have always been in iise. Yesterday, at eleven o'clock in the evening, the master of the post-house sent to a village more than a league distant to search for clean sheets on my account. I should have protested against this excess of zeal in my feldjäger, but I did not know of it until the next morning. From the window of my kennel, by the obscured light that is called night in Russia, I could admire at leisure the eternal Roman peristyle, which, with its wooden, whitewashed pediment and its plaster pillars, adorns, on the stable side, the Russian post-houses. This clumsy architecture creates a nightmare that follows me from one end of the empire to the other. The classic column has become the sign of a public building in Russia ·. false magnificence here displays itself by the side of the most complete penury; but " comfort," and elegance well understood and every where the same, is not to be seen, either in the palaces of the wealthy, where the saloons are superb, but where the bed-chamber is only a screen, or yet in the huts of the peasants. There may, perhaps, be two or three exceptions to this rule in the whole empire. Even Spain appears to me less in want than Russia of objects of convenience and necessity.

Another precaution indispensable to a traveller in this country is a Russian lock. All the Slavonian peasants are thieves, in the houses if not on the highway. When, therefore, you have got your luggage into the room of an inn, full of different classes of