Page:The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (volume V).djvu/174

Rh can lift thirty! Nothing to compare with us, indeed! I will venture to tell you some thing I remember, and can't get out of my head. Last spring I visited the Crystal Palace near London; in that Palace, as you 're aware, there 's a sort of exhibition of everything that has been devised by the ingenuity of man—an encyclopaedia of humanity one might call it. Well, I walked to and fro among the machines and implements and statues of great men; and all the while I thought, if it were decreed that some nation or other should disappear from the face of the earth, and with it everything that nation had invented, should disappear from the Crystal Palace, our dear mother. Holy Russia, could go and hide herself in the lower regions, without disarranging a single nail in the place: everything might remain undisturbed where it is; for even the samovar, the woven bast shoes, the yoke-bridle, and the knout—these are our famous products—were not invented by us. One could not carry out the same experiment on the Sandwich islanders; those islanders have made some peculiar canoes and javelins of their own; their absence would be noticed by visitors. It's a libel! it's too severe, you say perhaps. . . . But I say, first, I don't know how to roar like any sucking dove; and secondly, it 's plain that it 's not only the devil no one dares to look