Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/191

 How good the pickled herrings were at the Oude-Doelen at the Hague! What a famous four-poster they put you into, at the Old Bible in Amsterdam! Could anything be better than the table d'hôte at the Hotel d'Angleterre at Berlin—save, perhaps, that at the Hotel de Russie, close by, and that other Russie at Frankfort? That Drei Mohren, at Augsburg, was a good house, too. What a cellar! what imperial tokay! 'Tis true that the waiter at Basle swindled you in the matter of the Bremen cigars which he declared to be Havanas; but was not that little mishap amply atoned for at the Schweizer Hof, Lucerne, six hours afterwards? The Schweizer Hof! Dear me! how happy you were, idling about all day long, peering at Mount Pilate, or watching, with never-ending interest, the tiny boats on the bosom of the great blue lake! Here is an envelope directed to you at Cernobbio; another at the Villa d'Este: another at Bellaggio, on the Lake of Como. Here come Salò and Desenzano, on the Lake of Garda. Ah! a villanous hostelry the last; but with what exultation you hurried back through Brescia to the clean and comfortable Hotel Cavour at Milan! You were rather short of money, perhaps, when you arrived in the capital of Lombardy. Your stock of circular notes was growing small. No cash awaited you at the Albergo Cavour—nay, nor letters either. But there would be letters for you, it was certain, at the Poste Restante. Quick, Portiere, "un broum"—Milanese for brougham, and not very wide of the mark. You hasten to the Poste Restante. There the letters await you; there is the stack of circular notes. Yes, and here among your envelopes at home, is the banker's letter of advice, enumerating a hundred cities where he has agents who will gladly cash your notes at the current rate of exchange, deducting neither agio nor discount.

The postage and the reception of a letter in foreign countries—notably the less civilised—are events accompanied by circumstances generally curious and occasionally terrifying. I never saw a Chinese postman, but I can picture him as a kind of embodied bamboo, who presents you with your packet of correspondence with some preposterous ceremonial, or uses some outrageously hyperbolical locution to inform you that your letter is insufficiently stamped. As for the Russian Empire, I can vouch, personally, for the whole postal system of that tremendous dominion being, twelve years ago, environed with a network of strange observances. The prepayment of a letter from St. Petersburg to England involved the attendance of at least three separate departments of the imperial post-office, and the administration of at least one bribe to a dingy official with a stand-up collar to his napless tail coat, and the symbolical buttons of the "Tchinn" on the band of his cap. As those who have ever made acquaintance with the stage doorkeepers of theatres, in any part of the world, are aware that those functionaries are generally eating something from a basin (preferably yellow), so those who have ever been constrained to do business with a Russian government clerk of the lower grades will remember that, conspicuous by the side of the blotting pad (under which you slipped the rouble notes when you bribed him), there was always a soddened blue pocket-handkerchief, the which, rolled up into a ball, or twisted into a thong, or waved wide like a piratical flag, served him alternately as a sign of content, a gesture of refusal, or an emblem of defiance. You couldn't prepay your letter without this azure semaphore being put through the whole of its paces; unless, indeed, previous to attending the post-office, you took the precaution of requesting some mercantile friend to affix the stamp of his firm to your envelope. Then, the official pocket-handkerchief assumed, permanently, the spherical, or satisfied stage; and you had, moreover, the satisfaction of knowing that the stamp of the firm might stand you in good stead as an Eastern firman, and that, in all probability, your letter would not be opened and read as a preliminary to its being despatched to its destination.

So much for sending a letter; on which you seldom failed (purely through official oversight, of course), to be overcharged. There were two ways of receiving a letter; both equally remarkable. I used to live in a thoroughfare called the Cadetten-Linie, in the island of Wassili-Ostrow. It was about three times longer than that Upper Wigmore-street to which Sydney Smith declared that there was no end. When any English friend had sufficiently mastered the mysteries of Russian topographology as to write "Cadetten-Linie" and " Wassili-Ostrow" correctly, I got my letter. This was but seldom. It was delivered at the hotel where I resided, in a manner which reminded me vaguely, but persistently, of the spectacle of Timour the Tartar, and of the Hetman Platoff leading a pulk of Cossacks over the boundless steppes of the Ukraine. The