and the oddity of
the signs upon which their contents are pictured. What these symbols
of trade lack in artistic style they make up in grotesque effects.
Thus, the tobacco shops are ornamented outside with various
highly-colored pictures, drawn by artists of the most florid genius,
representing cigar-boxes, pipes, meerschaums, narghillas, bunches of
cigars, snuffboxes, plugs and twists of tobacco, and all that the most
fastidious smoker, chewer, or snuffer can expect to find in any
tobacco shop, besides a good many things that he never will find in
any of these shops. Prominent among these symbolical displays is the
counterfeit presentment of a jet-black Indian of African descent--his
woolly head adorned with a crown of pearls and feathers; in his right
hand an uplifted tomahawk, with which he is about to kill some
invisible enemy; in his left a meerschaum, supposed to be the pipe of
peace; a tobacco plantation in the background, and a group of warriors
smoking profusely around a camp-fire, located under one of the tobacco
plants; the whole having a very fine allegorical effect, fully
understood, no doubt, by the artist, but very difficult to explain
upon any known principle of art. The butchers' shops are equally
prolific in external adornments. On the sign-boards you see every
animal fit to be eaten, and many of questionable aspect, denuded of
their skins and reduced to every conceivable degree of butchery; so
that if you want a veal cutlet of any particular pattern, all you have
to do is to select your pattern, and the cutlet will be chopped
accordingly. The bakeries excel in their artistic displays. Here you
have painted bread from black-moon down to double-knotted twist;
cakes, biscuit, rolls, and crackers, and as many other varieties as
the genius of the artist may be capable of suggesting. The bakers of
Moscow are mostly French or German; and it is a notable fact that the
bread is quite equal to any made in France or Germany. The
wine-stores, of which there are many, are decorated with pictures of
bottles, and bas-reliefs of gilded grapes--a great improvement upon
the ordinary grape produced by nature.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE MARKETS OF MOSCOW.

If there is nothing new under the sun, there are certainly a good many
old things to interest a stranger in Moscow. A favorite resort of mine
during my sojourn in that strange old city of the Czars was in the
markets of the Katai Gorod. Those of the Riadi and Gos