Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/192

 was one of the fiercest little men, with one of the fiercest and largest cocked-hats I ever saw. His face was yellow in the bony and livid in the fleshy parts; and the huge moustache lying on his upper lip, looked like a leech bound to suck away at him for evermore for some misdeeds of the Promethean kind.

This Russian postman: don't let me forget his sword, with its rusty leather scabbard and its brazen hilt, which seemed designed, like Hudibras's, to hold bread and cheese; and not omitting, again, the half dozen little tin-pot crosses and medals attached by dirty scraps of parti-coloured ribbon to his breast; for this brave had "served," and had only failed to obtain a commission because he was not "born." This attaché of St. Sergius-le-Grand, if that highly-respectable saint can be accepted as a Muscovite equivalent for our St. Martin of Aldersgate, used to come clattering down the Cadetten-Linie on a shaggy little pony, scattering the pigeons, and confounding the vagrant curs. You know the tremendous stir at a review, when a chief, for no earthly purpose that I know of, save to display his horsemanship and to put himself and his charger out of breath, sets off, at a tearing gallop, from one extremity of the line to the other: the cock feathers in the hats of his staff flying out behind them like foam from the driving waters. Well: the furious charge of a general on Plumstead Marshes was something like the pace of the Russian postman. If he had had many letters to deliver on his way, he would have been compelled to modify the ardour of his wild career; but it always seemed to me that nineteen-twentieths of the Cadetten-Linie were taken up by dead walls, painted a glaring yellow, and that the remaining twentieth was occupied by the house where I resided. It was a very impressive spectacle to see him bring up the little pony short before the gate of the hotel, dismount, look proudly around, caress the ever-sucking leech on his lip—as for twisting the ends of it, the vampire would never have permitted such a liberty—and beckon to some passing Ivan Ivanovitch, with a ragged beard and caftan, to hold his steed, or in default of any prowling Ivan being in the way, attach his pony's bridle to the palisades. It was a grand sound to hear him thundering—he was a little man, but he did thunder—up the stone stairs, the brass tip of his sword-scabbard bumping against his spurs, and his spurs clanking against the stones, and the gloves hanging from a steel ring in his belt, playing rub-a-dub-dub on the leather pouch which held his letters for delivery—my letters, my newspapers, when they hadn't been confiscated—with all the interesting paragraphs neatly daubed out with black paint by the censor. And when this martial postman handed you a letter, you treated him to liquor, and gave him copecks. All this kind of tiling is altered, I suppose, by this time in Russia. I have seen the lowest order of police functionary—and the martial postman was first cousin to a polizei—seize Ivan Ivanovitch, if he offended him, by his ragged head, and beat him with his sword-belt about the mouth until he made it bleed. Whereas, in these degenerate days, I am told, a Russian gentleman who wears epaulettes, or a sword, is not allowed so much as to pull a droschky-driver's ears, or kick him in the small of the back, if he turn to the left instead of the right. Decidedly, the times are as much out of joint as a broken marionette.

I have no doubt, either, that the transaction of prepaying a letter has been very much simplified since the period in which I visited Russia. The Poste Restante also, has, of course, been sweepingly reformed. Brooms were not used in Russia in my time, save for the purpose of thrashing Ivan Ivanovitch. The St. Petersburg Poste Restante in 1856 was one of the oddest institutions imaginable. It was a prudent course to take your landlord, or some Russian friend, with you, to vouch for your respectability. In any case, you were bound to produce your passport, or rather, your "permission to sojourn," which had been granted to you—on your paying for it—when the police at Count Orloff's had sequestrated your Foreign Office passport. When divers functionaries—all of the type of him with the blotting-pad and the blue pockethandkerchief—were quite satisfied that you were not a forger of rouble notes, or an incendiary, or an agent for the sale of M. Herzen's Kolokol, their suspicions gave way to the most unbounded confidence. You were ushered into a large room; a sack of letters from every quarter of the globe was bundled out upon the table; and you were politely invited to try if you could make out anything that looked as though it belonged to you. I am afraid that, as a rule, I did not obtain the property to which I was entitled, and somebody else had helped himself to that which belonged to me. I wonder who got my letters, and read them, or are they still mouldering in the Petropolitan Poste Restante?