12 THROUGH RUSSIA ON A MUSTANG. 



midwifery. Everything in the student life, especially 

 the girl student life, is faddy and eccentric. It is the 

 spasmodic attempt of the intellectual Russian youth 

 to find some employment, some scope for their energy 

 and ambition, in a field where there is next to no 

 intellectual employment at all. 



A small crowd was gathering on the street corner, as 

 I left my window in the cafe. The Czar was coming 

 in from Peterhoff and would drive this way. I did not 

 wait, for I had seen him and the Empress before. The 

 Emperor and Empress were almost as much in evi- 

 dence as the President in Washington. When the 

 Czar and the Italian heir-apparent, who was visiting St. 

 Petersburg, drove down the Nevski, it was down a lane 

 through the assembled and applauding populace, on 

 which scarcely a soldier or a policeman was to be seen. 

 The people were under less restraint than a New York 

 crowd is at any popular gathering. 



All this impressed me, a new arrival, with a sense of 

 agreeable surprise. 



Yes ; St. Petersburg, consummate actress and gay 

 deceiver that she is, was bewitching, disporting herself, 

 arrayed in the focused glories of an empire, to the ad- 

 miration of an audience of pleasure-seeking tourists 

 from everywhere. The pageantry of the Czar's 

 capital was ever on the move across the stage. To- 

 day the christening and launching of an ironclad ; to- 

 morrow a priestly procession along the Nevski, a 

 glittering cavalcade of monks in golden vestments, in 

 honor of the Emperor's name-day; the next day, a 

 military review. 



One day I resolved to leave this pomp and Imperial 



