ty to
give back, without the least embarrassment,) or seeking out the scarred
and gray-haired officers who have come hither from all parts of the vast
empire. He does not scrutinize whether or not your back is turned
towards him as he passes. Once, on entering a door rather hastily, I
came within an ace of a personal collision; whereupon he laughed
good-humoredly, caught me by the hands, and saying, "It would have been
a shock, _n'est ce pas_?" hurried on.

To me the most delightful part of the Winter Palace was the garden. It
forms one of the suite of thirty halls, some of them three hundred feet
long, on the second story. In this garden, which is perhaps a hundred
feet square by forty in height, rise clumps of Italian cypress and
laurel from beds of emerald turf and blooming hyacinths. In the centre a
fountain showers over fern-covered rocks, and the gravel-walks around
the border are shaded by tall camellia-trees in white and crimson bloom.
Lamps of frosted glass hang among the foliage, and diffuse a mellow
golden moonlight over the enchanted ground. The corridor adjoining the
garden resembles a bosky alley, so completely are the walls hidden by
flowering shrubbery.

Leaving the Imperial family, and the kindred houses of Leuchtenberg,
Oldenburg, and Mecklenburg, all of which are represented, let us devote
a little attention to the ladies, and the crowd of distinguished, though
unroyal personages. The former are all _decolletees_, of course,--even
the Countess ----, who, I am positively assured, is ninety-five years
old; but I do not notice much uniformity of taste, except in the matter
of head-dresses. "Waterfalls" have not yet made their appearance, but
there are huge coils and sweeps of hair,--a mane-like munificence, so
disposed as to reveal the art and conceal the artifice. The ornaments
are chiefly flowers, though here and there I see jewels, coral, mossy
sticks, dead leaves, birds, and birds'-nests. From the blonde locks of
yonder princess hang bunches of green brook-grass, and a fringe of the
same trails from her bosom and skirt: she resembles a fished-up and
restored Ophelia. Here passes a maiden with a picket-fence of rose coral
as a _berthe_, and she seems to have another around the bottom of her
dress; but, as the mist of tulle is brushed aside in passing, we can
detect that the latter is a clever _chenille_ imitation. There is
another with small moss-covered twigs (the real article) arranged in the
same