tovini Dvor
present the greatest attractions, perhaps, in the way of shops and
merchandise; for there, by the aid of time, patience, and money, you
can get any thing you want, from saints' armlets and devils down to
candlesticks and cucumbers. Singing-birds, Kazan-work, and Siberian
diamonds are its most attractive features. But if you have a passion
for human oddities rather than curiosities of merchandise, you must
visit the second-hand markets extending along the walls of the Katai
Gorod, where you will find not only every conceivable variety of old
clothes, clocks, cooking utensils, and rubbish of all sorts, but the
queerest imaginable conglomeration of human beings from the far East
to the far West. It would be a fruitless task to attempt a description
of the motley assemblage. Pick out all the strangest, most ragged,
most uncouth figures you ever saw in old pictures, from childhood up
to the present day; select from every theatrical representation
within the range of your experience the most monstrous and absurd
caricatures upon humanity; bring to your aid all the masquerades and
burlesque fancy-balls you ever visited, tumble them together in the
great bag of your imagination, and pour them out over a vague
wilderness of open spaces, dirty streets, high walls, and rickety
little booths, and you have no idea at all of the queer old markets of
the Katai Gorod. You will be just as much puzzled to make any thing of
the scene as when you started, if not more so.

[Illustration: OLD-CLOTHES' MARKET.]

No mortal man can picture to another all these shaggy-faced Russians,
booted up to the knees, their long, loose robes flaunting idly around
their legs, their red sashes twisted around their waists; brawny
fellows with a reckless, independent swagger about them, stalking like
grim savages of the North through the crowd. Then there are the sallow
and cadaverous Jew peddlers, covered all over with piles of ragged old
clothes, and mountains of old hats and caps; and leathery-faced old
women--witches of Endor--dealing out horrible mixtures of _quass_ (the
national drink); and dirty, dingy-looking soldiers, belonging to the
imperial service, peddling off old boots and cast-off shirts; and
Zingalee gipsies, dark, lean, and wiry, offering strings of beads and
armlets for sale with shrill cries; and so on without limit.

Here you see the rich and the poor in all the extremes of affluence
and poverty; the robust and the decrepi