“There are almost as many ways of making shtshee as of cooking potatoes. I have seen six or seven cabbages chopped up small, half a pound of butter, a handful of salt, and two pounds of minced mutton added, the whole mixed up with a can or two of kwas. But it is now time, brothers, for us to sally forth. I must do the honours of this our city, and show my illustrious guests whatever I may deem worthy of their observation.”
[ CHAPTER XVII.]
A RAMBLE OVER ST. PETERSBURG.
“What a nation of painters Russia must be!” exclaimed I, as we quietly moved through the silent streets. Every shop had a picture before it, expressive of the occupation of its owner. Here was a tempting board covered with representations of every loaf and roll that a painter’s fancy could devise; there a tallow-chandler did his best to make candles appear picturesque. Even from the second and third floors hung portraits of fiddles, and flutes, boots, shoes, caps, bonnets, and bears’ grease, and on one board a sad likeness of a rat in a trap made us quicken our steps as we passed it.
We moved through a deserted market. Here whole lanes are devoted to the sale of a single kind of article. There is the stocking row, the shoe row, the hat row, at which it appeared that a whole nation might have provided covering for head and for feet.
“I wish, dear brother,” said Wisky, “that your visit had been in the season of winter. I could then have led you to a market which strangers must indeed have surveyed with surprise. You would then have seen beasts, fishes, and fowls, all frozen so hard that the hatchet is required to divide them. You would have passed through rows of dead sheep standing upon their feet, motionless oxen that seemed ready to low, whole flocks of white hares appearing actually in motion, reindeer and elks on whose mighty horns the pigeons fearlessly perch!”
“The cold must then be fearful in winter,” said I.
“Oh! the houses are kept so warm with stoves that there but little suffering is known. But woe to the men who loiter in the streets when they are paved with ice and glistening with snow! The passengers run for their lives, with the sharp wind rushing after them, as a cat after a mouse! Men cover even their faces with fur; but should an unlucky nose peep out from the warm shelter, the bitter frost often bites it on a sudden. “Father—father! thy nose!” thus will one stranger salute another as he passes; and if not speedily rubbed with snow, the nose of the poor passenger is lost! Men’s very eyes are sometimes frozen up, and they have no resource but to beg admission at the first door to which they can grope, to unthaw their glued lashes at a stove!”
“All this is very curious,” observed I, “but still I have little desire to witness it. The long winter must be dreary indeed!”
“The Russians are lively fellows,” observed Wisky, “and instead of grumbling at dark skies and piercing blasts, they make merry where others would murmur. When winter must perforce be their companion, they oblige the grim old giant to add to their amusements. You should see the gay sledges as they dash at full speed over the frozen surface of the River Neva! and the ice-mountains which the people raise, and down which they glide swift as lightning, laughing, shouting, and singing! I have seen snow piled up to the very roof of a house; and down its steep slope, merely seated on a mat, a large merry party glide gaily to the ground. But,” he cried, suddenly interrupting himself, “have a care where you tread, my brother, or you will be down into that ice-pit! Never was there such a place as St. Petersburg for these,—no large house is deemed complete without one. If Russians cannot be without abundance of ice in winter, they show that they will not be without it during their brief hot summer,—the quantities consumed could scarcely be believed!”
Whiskerandos, who had been lingering behind us, in a tempting quarter of the market, now scampered up and joined us. We were passing at the time a large building, and I could not avoid looking up in wonder at its strange columns. Of these there were no fewer than a hundred, and the capital of each was formed by three cannon, with their round open mouths yawning down into the street.