bear is hastily gutted and dressed with flowers. When all is ready
the royal party return to the railroad depot in a long procession,
headed by his majesty, and brought up in the rear by the dead body of
Bruin borne on poles by six-and-twenty powerful serfs. Refreshments in
the mean time have been administered to every body of high and low
degree, and by the time they reach the depot there are but two sober
individuals in the entire procession--his royal majesty and the bear.
Farther refreshments are administered all round during the journey
back to St. Petersburg, and, notwithstanding he is rigidly prohibited
by his physician from the use of stimulating beverages, it is supposed
that a reaction has now taken place, which renders necessary a
modification of the medical ukase. At all events, I am told the bear
is sometimes the only really steady member of the party by the time
the imperial pageant reaches the palace. When the usual ceremonies of
congratulation are over, a merry dance winds up the evening. After
this the company disperses to prayer and slumber, and thus ends the
great bear-hunt of his majesty the Autocrat of all the Russias.

CHAPTER XI.

RUSSIAN HUMOR.

The Russians have little or no humor, though they are not deficient in
a certain grotesque savagery bordering on the humorous. There is
something fearfully vicious in the royal freaks of fancy of which
Russian history furnishes us so many examples. We read with a shudder
of the facetious compliment paid to the Italian architect by Ivan the
Terrible, who caused the poor man's eyes to be put out that he might
never see to build another church so beautiful as that of St. Basil.
We can not but smile at the grim humor of Peter the Great, who, upon
seeing a crowd of men with wigs and gowns at Westminster Hall, and
being informed that they were lawyers, observed that he had but two in
his whole empire, and he believed he would hang one of them as soon as
he got home. A still more striking though less ghastly freak of fancy
was that perpetrated by the Empress Anne of Courland, who, on the
occasion of the marriage of her favorite buffoon, Galitzin, caused a
palace of ice to be built, with a bed of the same material, in which
she compelled the happy pair to pass their wedding night. The Empress
Catharine II., a Pomeranian by birth, but thoroughly Russian in her
morals, possessed a more ardent temperament. What time she did not
spend in gratifying her amb