he aristocratic Pages' Corps, on Great Garden Street, hard by, in the
University, the Law School, the Lyceum, or the Gymnasium, and we can
make a shrewd guess at their future professions by their faces as well
as by their uniforms. The lady who comes to meet us in sleeved pelisse,
wadded with eider-down, and the one in a short jacket have arrived, and
must return, on foot; they could not drive far in the open air, so
thinly clad.

At Christmas-tide there is a great augmentation in the queer "Vyazemsky"
and other cakes, the peasant laces, sweet Vyborg cracknels, fruit
pastils, and other popular goods, on which these petty open-air dealers
appear to thrive, both in health and purse. The spacious area between
the bazaar and the sidewalk of the Nevsky is filled with
Christmas-trees, beautifully unadorned, or ruined with misplaced
gaudiness, brought in, in the majority of cases, by Finns from the
surrounding country. Again, in the week preceding Palm Sunday, the
_Verbnaya Yarmaraka_, or Pussy Willow Fair, takes place here. Nominally,
it is held for the purpose of providing the public with twigs of that
aesthetic plant (the only one which shows a vestige of life at that
season), which are used as palms, from the Emperor's palace to the
poorest church in the land. In reality, it is a most amusing fair for
toys and cheap goods suitable for Easter eggs; gay paper roses,
wherewith to adorn the Easter cake; and that combination of sour and
sweet cream and other forbidden delicacies, the _paskha_, with which the
long, severe fast is to be broken, after midnight matins on Easter. Here
are plump little red Finland parrots, green and red finches, and other
song-birds, which kindly people buy and set free, after a pretty custom.
The board and canvas booths, the sites for which are drawn by lot by
soldiers' widows, and sold or used as suits their convenience, are
locked at night by dropping the canvas flap, and are never guarded;
while the hint that thefts may be committed, or that watching is
necessary, is repelled with indignation by the stall-keepers.

There is always a popular toy of the hour. One year it consisted of
highly colored, beautifully made bottle-imps, which were loudly cried as
_Amerikanskiya zhiteli_,--inhabitants of America. We inquired the
reason for their name.

"They are made in the exact image of the Americans," explained the
peasant vendor, offering a pale blue imp, with a long, red tongue and a
phenomenal tail