Whilst Alice attended to his food and cleaned out the cage, Beatrice opened the cage door, and the parrot came out, and hopped outside, and let Beatrice smooth down his pretty grey feathers, and he put his beak against her hand, but he never bit her little fingers.
‘Grandmamma,’ said Alice, ‘you told me once that the days in Russia were so very long in summer and so very short in winter. How much longer and shorter are they than our days here?’
‘The longest day here in England, which is June the 21st, is reckoned to be sixteen hours and thirty-four minutes long. Now, can you reckon how much remains out of twenty-four hours for the night?’
‘Oh, grandmamma, that is very difficult.’
‘Well, then, I will tell you, seven hours and twenty-six minutes. Now in Russia, or I should better say in that part of Russia where I lived, the longest day was about nineteen or twenty hours long; and as there is a long twilight, which comes before the rising of the sun, and follows its setting, there is scarcely any darkness, and everybody can go to bed without a candle.’
‘What is twilight, grandmamma?’
‘Twilight is an uncertain second light, or a light that is something between sunlight and night.
‘The peasants, or poor people, who work in the fields, rise with the sun in summer, and go to bed with it; but as the night is too short to rest them enough after their many hours of labour, they divide the day into three parts for their work, making a long rest from eight till ten for their breakfast, and from one to four or five in the afternoon for their dinner, and then work till quite late at night. They sleep generally once in the day, which is very necessary for them.
‘One beautiful summer day, in the month of June, I crossed the Gulf of Finland, from Helsingfors to Revel, in a steamboat belonging to the Crown, which was much slower than a common passenger steamer, as all things belonging to the Russian Crown are very ill managed.
‘Look at the map, my Alice, and you will see that Helsingfors lies more to the north of Revel; and thus the days there in summer are longer still, and the days in winter shorter, for the more north we go, the longer are the days in summer and shorter in winter.