the inquirer had heard it from ‘a pretty China girl.’ Now lov-pidgin means love, and me kamāva tut is perfectly good gypsy anywhere for ‘I love you;’ and a very soft expression it is, recalling kama-deva, the Indian Cupid, whose bow is strung with bees, and whose name has two strings to it, since it means, both in gypsy and Sanskrit, Love-God, or the god of love. ‘It’s kāma-duvel, you know, rya, if you put it as it ought to be,’ said Old Windsor Froggie to me once; ‘but I think that Kāma-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 cafés, 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° below zero, Fahr. At the appointed hour the troika, or three-horse sleigh, was before the Hôtel 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 the troika, and the sweetest, saddest melody and most plaintive song of Russia belong to it.
THE TROIKA.
Vot y’dit troika udalaiya.