god of love. 'It's _kama-duvel_, you know, _rya_, if
you put it as it ought to be,' said Old Windsor Froggie to me once; 'but
I think that Kama-_devil_ would by rights come nearer to it, if Cupid is
what you mean.'"

I referred the gypsy difficulty to a Russian gentleman of high position,
to whose kindness I had been greatly indebted while in St. Petersburg.
He laughed.

"Come with me to-morrow night to the _cafes_, and see the gypsies; I know
them well, and can promise that you shall talk with them as much as you
like. Once, in Moscow, I got together all in the town--perhaps a hundred
and fifty--to entertain the American minister, Curtin. That was a very
hard thing to do,--there was so much professional jealousy among them,
and so many quarrels. Would you have believed it?"

I thought of the feuds between sundry sturdy Romanys in England, and felt
that I could suppose such a thing, without dangerously stretching my
faith, and I began to believe in Russian gypsies.

"Well, then, I shall call for you to-morrow night with a _troika_; I will
come early,--at ten. They never begin to sing before company arrive at
eleven, so that you will have half an hour to talk to them."

It is on record that the day on which the general gave me this kind
invitation was the coldest known in St. Petersburg for thirty years, the
thermometer having stood, or rather having lain down and groveled that
morning at 40 degrees below zero, Fahr. At the appointed hour the
_troika_, or three-horse sleigh, was before the Hotel d'Europe. It was,
indeed, an arctic night, but, well wrapped in fur-lined _shubas_, with
immense capes which fall to the elbow or rise far above the head, as
required, and wearing fur caps and fur-lined gloves, we felt no cold.
The beard of our _istvostshik_, or driver, was a great mass of ice,
giving him the appearance of an exceedingly hoary youth, and his small
horses, being very shaggy and thoroughly frosted, looked in the darkness
like immense polar bears. If the general and myself could only have been
considered as gifts of the slightest value to anybody, I should have
regarded our turn-out, with the driver in his sheep-skin coat, as coming
within a miracle of resemblance to that of Santa Claus, the American
Father Christmas.

On, at a tremendous pace, over the snow, which gave out under our runners
that crunching, iron sound only heard when the thermometer touches zero.
There is a peculiar fascination about