joyed after becoming
a free agent! Then he may go off (at the age of fifty or sixty, say),
unless disease or gunpowder has carried him off long before, to enjoy
the sweets of hard labor in some agreeable desert, or the position of
a watchman on the frontiers of Siberia, where the climate is probably
considered salubrious.

These may be considered royal or princely vagaries, in which great
people are privileged to indulge; but I think it will be found that
the same capricious savagery of humor--if I may so call it--prevails
to some extent among all classes of Russians. In some instances it can
scarcely be associated with any idea of mirthfulness, yet in the love
of strange, startling, and incongruous ideas there is something
bordering on the humorous. On Recollection Monday, for example, the
mass of the people go out into the grave-yards, and, spreading
table-cloths on the mounds that cover the dead bodies of their
relatives, drink quass and vodka to the health of the deceased,
saying, "Since the dead are unable to drink, the living must drink for
them!" Rather a grave excuse, one must think, for intoxication.

In the museum of Peter the Great at St. Petersburg stands the stuffed
skin of his favorite servant--a gigantic Holsteiner--one of the most
ghastly of all the grotesque and ghastly relics in that remarkable
institution. It is not a very agreeable subject for the pencil of an
artist, yet there is something so original in the idea of stuffing a
human being and putting him up for exhibition before the public that I
am constrained to introduce the following sketch of this strange
spectacle.

In one of the arsenals is an eagle made of gun-flints, with swords for
wings, daggers for feathers, and the mouths of cannons for eyes. A
painting of the Strelitzes, in another, represents heaven as
containing the Russian priests and all the faithful; while the other
place--a region of fire and brimstone--contains Jews, Tartars,
Germans, and negroes!

[Illustration: SKINNED AND STUFFED MAN.]

The winter markets of Moscow and St. Petersburg present some of the
most cadaverous specimens of the startling humor in which the Russians
delight. Here you find frozen oxen, calves, sheep, rabbits, geese,
ducks, and all manner of animals and birds, once animate with life,
now stiff and stark in death. The oxen stand staring at you with their
fixed eyes and gory carcasses; the calves are jumping or frisking in
skinless innocence; the