, assumed the garb of a pilot, put down his name on the list
of workmen, wielded with his own hand the caulking iron and the mallet,
fixed the pumps, and twisted the ropes. Ambassadors who came to pay
their respects to him were forced, much against their will, to clamber
up the rigging of a man of war, and found him enthroned on the cross
trees.

Such was the prince whom the populace of London now crowded to behold.
His stately form, his intellectual forehead, his piercing black eyes,
his Tartar nose and mouth, his gracious smile, his frown black with all
the stormy rage and hate of a barbarian tyrant, and above all a strange
nervous convulsion which sometimes transformed his countenance during a
few moments, into an object on which it was impossible to look without
terror, the immense quantities of meat which he devoured, the pints
of brandy which he swallowed, and which, it was said, he had carefully
distilled with his own hands, the fool who jabbered at his feet, the
monkey which grinned at the back of his chair, were, during some weeks,
popular topics of conversation. He meanwhile shunned the public gaze
with a haughty shyness which inflamed curiosity. He went to a play; but,
as soon as he perceived that pit, boxes and galleries were staring,
not at the stage, but at him, he retired to a back bench where he was
screened from observation by his attendants. He was desirous to see a
sitting of the House of Lords; but, as he was determined not to be seen,
he was forced to climb up to the leads, and to peep through a small
window. He heard with great interest the royal assent given to a bill
for raising fifteen hundred thousand pounds by land tax, and learned
with amazement that this sum, though larger by one half than the whole
revenue which he could wring from the population of the immense empire
of which he was absolute master, was but a small part of what
the Commons of England voluntarily granted every year to their
constitutional King.

William judiciously humoured the whims of his illustrious guest, and
stole to Norfolk Street so quietly that nobody in the neighbourhood
recognised His Majesty in the thin gentleman who got out of the modest
looking coach at the Czar's lodgings. The Czar returned the visit with
the same precautions, and was admitted into Kensington House by a
back door. It was afterwards known that he took no notice of the fine
pictures with which the palace was adorned. But over the chimney of
th