fee-house, as we should call it) undoubtedly witnesses many keen trials
of commercial fence, this is very far from being its only use. What the
Agora was to the Athenian, what the Forum was to the Roman, what the
"tea-house" still is to the "heathen Chinee" and the "ice-house" to the
West Indian,--all this, and more, the trakteer is to the Russian. It is
his dining-saloon, his drinking-bar, his news-room (when he happens to be
able to read), his place of meeting with his friends; and, in a word, his
place of resort for any and every purpose.

In such a place the groups of figures are diverse enough to satisfy the
most exacting "painter from life," and the dialogue is often far more
entertaining (which is not saying much) than that of many a popular
vaudeville. Indeed, a dramatist on the lookout for a bit of "comic
business" _not_ "adapted from the French" could not do better than drop
into a trakteer in Moscow--or, better still, Kazan--and make good use of
his eyes and his notebook for twenty minutes or half an hour.

Let us suppose our explorer to be strolling along the narrow, tortuous
streets of the Kitai-Gorod (Chinese Town) at Moscow on a fine winter day,
with the crisp snow crackling under foot, and the clear, bright, frosty
sky over head. Away he goes, past painted houses and staring signs and
gilded church-towers--past dark, narrow shop-doors like exaggerated
rat-traps, with a keen, well-whiskered tenant peering watchfully out of
each--past clamorous groups of blue-frocked, red-girdled cabmen--past
sheepskin-clad beggars, each with his little tablet stamped with a gilt
cross to show that the alms bestowed are to be devoted to the building of
some apocryphal church, probably of the same kind as that spoken of by
Petroleum V. Nasby: "The proceeds air to be devoted entirely to the
'church'--which is _me_."

At length, after many turnings and windings, he comes out upon the vast
open space of the Krasnaya Ploshtchad (Red Plain), with the statues of
Minin and Pojarski on his right, and on his left the cluster of
many-colored domes that crown the fantastic church of Vasili the Blessed,
while right in front of him rise the red-turreted wall of the Kremlin and
the tall spear-pointed tower of the "Gate of Salvation." And now, being by
this time somewhat fatigued by the exertion of a prolonged tramp in a
heavy fur overcoat and felt-lined goloshes, he makes for a doorway above
which appears, in crabbed Slavonian character