3 1 6 THRO UGH R US SI A ON A MUSI 'ANG. 



belong to old Russia. A state in which the women of 

 the household are excluded from the society of the 

 opposite sex, and are required to live the life of the 

 harem, is favorable to the development of such habits 

 as cigarette smoking and indulgence in opium, as in 

 Turkey and Persia. 



Oriental ideas in regard to the fair sex still prevail 

 among the Russian mercantile class, and the merchants' 

 wives and daughters are the most inveterate consumers 

 of cigarettes. But the nobility and the educated sec- 

 tion of society have wholly emerged from the Eastern 

 conception of female seclusion, and many women of 

 this class would nowadays be ashamed to smoke in a 

 railway carriage or public garden. A woman who 

 chooses to smoke in public, however, is by no means 

 regarded as unladylike. Rather is she in danger of 

 being looked upon by her more " advanced " country- 

 woman as behind the times — a sort of country cousin, 

 who is regarded with much the same scorn as if she 

 wore unfashionable clothes. 



The foreigner going to Russia would, moreover, 

 never suspect that cigarette smoking is on the wane. 

 Whether on train or on steamboat he is not unlikely to 

 be approached by more than one woman, cigarette in 

 hand, begging a light. And when he returns to his 

 own country, among the reminiscences of his travels 

 will be visions of both old women and young, fair and 

 otherwise, who have engraved their images on his 

 memory by reason of the great number of cigarettes 

 they consumed in his presence. I have seen women on 

 the train lay a box of ten cigarettes in their lap and 

 make a " chain smoke " of the lot. Some women carry 



