Punch: Punch (81.1881)

102 PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI. [September 3, 1881.

TENDER CONSIDERATION.

" Oh, don't make Faces at him, Effie I It might Frighten him, you know !"

A DIP INTO ASIA.

{From Our Special Courier of St. Petersburg.)

ThePuE are two advantages in arriving at St. Petersburg. Though
you have been three nights and three days in the train, and are lucky
if you escape an extra day, according to the calendar you are twelve
days younger than when you left England, and according to the sun
you have always got two hours start of your friends in London. A
telegram sent to you on the 13th of August at eleven in the morning,
reaches your hands about 10 a.m. on the 1st of August. Wake up,
old England!

St. Petersburg is as mixed as a salad. Take a slice of the Thames
about Rotherhithe and Deptford, a little bit of Hull, a small piece of
Havre, a dash of Munich and Berlin, a small piece of Venice and a
larger piece of Rotterdam, a few back streets from a dull German
town like Crefeld, mix these with Tottenham Court Road, and you
get something like St. Petersburg. The shopkeepers in some parts
of the City are more like showmen than shopkeepers. They stand at
their doors with their "young men" to tempt you in, and in all
parts of the City they plaster their outward walls with pictorial
emblems of their trade. The river is magnificent, and the quays are
lined with palaces. The City is always on the quay-mve. Obvious
jokes are made at the expense of the river. It is called the Neva.
One sample will suffice :—" It is Neva too late to mend," generally
said when the ice is breaking up, &c.

The principal street, the " Nevskoi Perspective," is like White-
chapel and the Mile-End Road giving a grand imitation of Regent
Street. _ It is the fashionable afternoon resort for carriages and
pedestrians ; and as Russia is an autocratic iron and tyrannical, and
not a liberal and Bumble government, a penny tramway runs along
the whole middle of the road.

The roads generally are inlaid with round stones, varying in size
from a potato to a quartern loaf. They have made walking a lost
art in St. Petersburg. Everybody jolts along in Droskys. A
Drosky is a low "one-horse shay," about the size of a child's
perambulator. It is built to carry one, and licensed to carry two.
Its shafts are like the parallel lines denned in Euclid, with this
difference, they stretch to infinity, and nearly meet. The horse has

a high triumphal arch over his neck, which either keeps the shafts
asunder, or brings them together—it is difficult to say which. The
horses are strong, well-fed, and go. The London "crawler" is
unknown. The driver is dressed in a Jewish gaberdine, and wears
something like a Spanish Inquisitor's hat. The gaberdine is covered
with and covers the dirt of ages. He sits up far above his fare on a
kind of perch, and drives like a London costermonger. Riders in
Droskys in St. Petersburg will do well to see that they have no
loose money in their pockets, and no loose teeth in their heads, that
their shoes are tightly tied, and their hats well fixed on their heads.
I need say no more. People who think they can improve the St.
Petersburg Drosky and roads, may save themselves a deal of trouble.
Nature has otherwise provided. For eight months in the year a
velvet-pile carpet is laid down, called snow, and on this the Peters-
burghers make themselves very comfortable in sledges.

The Russian language is said to be difficult, and the alphabet
rather favours this statement. If you take the English language,
turn some of the letters hind part before, and turn a number of others
upside down, if you settle that the rest of the letters which you leave
alone shall stand for something precisely opposite to what they do in
England, and if you mix these with a few extra signs which resemble
Creek, you will get something like the Russian alphabet. _

The eating is peculiar. A real dinner d la llusse consists of two
tasting orders, and a deranged English feed. Tasting order number
one takes you to a side-table, where you have the liberty of trying
samples of nearly everything sold in an English Italian warehouse.
Caviare, smoked salmon, and raw herring, are only three things out
of twenty. Tasting order number two keeps you at the same table,
and gives you liberty to taste nearly every spirit and liquor known
in Europe and Asia. After that comes the dinner, where roast beef
follows soup, and fish follows roast beef. The soup is good and a
dinner in itself.

At the Cafes you drink weak tea, served in a tumbler with no
milk, and a slice of lemon. A superficial English traveller might
see it at a distance and think it was rum and water, or decide on
closer observation that there are no tea-cups in Russia. The be-
nighted Russians use tumblers, because glass keeps the tea hot for an

Russia being a despotic country, the Russians are treated like