ummer cities
in the vicinity, and dream, ah, vain dream! that they have also really
beheld the Nevsky Prospekt, the great avenue of the realm of the Frost
King and the White Tzar!*

* From _Scribner's Magazine_, by permission.

III.

MY EXPERIENCE WITH THE RUSSIAN CENSOR.

In spite of the advantage which I enjoyed in a preliminary knowledge of
the Russian language and literature, I was imbued with various false
ideas, the origin of which it is not necessary to trace on this
occasion. I freed myself from some of them; among others, from my theory
as to the working of the censorship in the case of foreign literature.
My theory was the one commonly held by Americans, and, as I found to my
surprise, by not a few Russians, viz., that books and periodicals which
have been wholly or in part condemned by the censor are to be procured
only in a mutilated condition, or by surreptitious means, or not at all.
That this is not the case I acquired ample proof through my personal
experience.

The first thing that an American does on his arrival in St. Petersburg
is to scan the foreign newspapers in the hotels eagerly for traces of
the censor's blot,--_le masque noir_, "caviare,"--his idea being
that at least one half of the page will be thus veiled from sight. But
specimens are not always, or even very often, to be procured with ease.
In fact, the demand exceeds the supply sometimes, if I may judge from my
own observations and from the pressing applications for these
curiosities which I received from disappointed seekers. The finest of
these black diamonds may generally be found in the inventive news
columns of the London dailies and in the flippant paragraphs of "Punch."

Like the rest of the world, I was on the lookout for the censor's work
from the day of my arrival, but it was a long time before my search was
rewarded by anything except a caricature of the censor himself in
"Kladderadatsch." That it was left unmasked was my first proof that that
gentleman, individually and collectively, was not deficient in a sense
of humor. The sketch represented a disheveled scribe seated three
quarters submerged in a bottle of ink, from the half-open cover of which
his quill pen projected like a signal of distress. This was accompanied
by an inscription to the effect that as the Russian censor had blacked
so many other people, he might now sit in the black for a while himself.
Perhaps the censor thought that remarks of that sort