irect me where to find gypsies _en
famille_, and the inquiries which I made of chance acquaintances simply
convinced me that the world at large was as ignorant of their ways as it
was prejudiced against them. At last the good-natured old porter of our
hotel told me, in his rough Baltic German, how to meet these mysterious
minstrels to advantage. "You must take a sleigh," he said, "and go out
to Petrovka. That is a place in the country, where there are grand
_cafes_ at considerable distances one from the other. Pay the driver
three rubles for four hours. Enter a _cafe_, call for something to
drink, listen to the gypsies singing, and when they pass round a plate
put some money in it. That's all." This was explicit, and at ten
o'clock in the evening I hired a sleigh and went.

If the cold which I had experienced in the general's troika in St.
Petersburg might be compared to a moderate rheumatism, that which I
encountered in the sleigh outside the walls of Moscow, on Christmas Eve,
1876, was like a fierce gout. The ride was in all conscience Russian
enough to have its ending among gypsies, Tartars, or Cossacks. To go at
a headlong pace over the creaking snow behind an _istvostshik_, named
Vassili, the round, cold moon overhead, church-spires tipped with great
inverted golden turnips in the distance, and this on a night when the
frost seemed almost to scream in its intensity, is as much of a sensation
in the suburbs of Moscow as it could be out on the steppes. A few
wolves, more or less, make no difference,--and even they come sometimes
within three hours' walk of the Kremlin. _Et ego inter lupos_,--I too
have been among wolves in my time by night, in Kansas, and thought
nothing of such rides compared to the one I had when I went gypsying from
Moscow.

In half an hour Vassili brought me to a house, which I entered. A "proud
porter," a vast creature, in uniform suggestive of embassies and kings'
palaces, relieved me of my _shuba_, and I found my way into a very large
and high hall, brilliantly lighted as if for a thousand guests, while the
only occupants were four couples, "spooning" _sans gene_, one in each
corner and a small party of men and girls drinking in the middle. I
called a waiter; he spoke nothing but Russian, and Russian is of all
languages the most useless to him who only talks it "a little." A little
Arabic, or even a little Chippewa, I have found of great service, but a
fair vocabulary and weeks