ll possess their many distinctive and interesting
features, costumes, and customs, and are most picturesque and
interesting, of course, during the long winter. It gives one a shock
almost to go for the first time to Warsaw or Petrograd--at Moscow there
is always the Kremlin--in the middle of the summer. There is little to
distinguish them then, apart from the ever-glorious beauty of the
churches, from Buda-Pest or Vienna.

But in the winter! Then it is everywhere still characteristic Russia.
The sledges, for instance, with their _troikas_! They are the same
carriages or _droschkes_ as in summer, but with runners instead of
wheels. Horses are harnessed in the same way in both seasons, and even
the coachmen seem to wear exactly the same dress all the year round,
edged with fur like their caps, though the padding inside the coat
_must_ be less in summer, one would think. The sledges of nobles and
other wealthy people, used in the winter only, are painted and decorated
most attractively. To drive out on a winter night, under a sky brilliant
with stars, the air extraordinarily keen, bracing, and stimulating, the
bells tinkling from the high and graceful yoke which rises from the
central horse of the three, wrapped in furs, and with no sounds but the
bells and the crack of whips and the subdued crunching of the snow, is
to taste one of the joys of life, and feel to the full, with happiness
in the feeling, "This is Russia!"

[Illustration: _A Well-clad Coachman._]

The coachmen pad up their robes of blue to an enormous extent, so that
they seem to bulge out over their seat. It is said to be a custom dating
from Catherine's days and from her requirements that there should be at
least twelve inches of good stuff between her coachman's skin and her
nose! But the present reason for the custom, which prevails, as far as I
know, in no other country, is that there is an objection to a thin
coachman. When I was speaking of the absurdity of these grotesque
padded-out figures to a lady whom I had taken into dinner one night in
Moscow, she at once said:--

"Well, I must say I like my coachman to look comfortable and well fed, I
should hate a thin one."

Dickens's fat boy in Pickwick must commend himself to Russia, for they
love Dickens and read him in translation and the original all through
the empire, as just what a driver ought to be. I should think coachmen
in Russia, however, _ought_ to be fat without any padding-up, for they