fruits, champagne, and all manner of costly delicacies.  But this lavish, ostentatious expenditure does not affect the ordinary current of his daily life.  As you enter those gaudily furnished rooms you can perceive at a glance that they are not for ordinary use.  You notice a rigid symmetry and an indescribable bareness which inevitably suggest that the original arrangements of the upholsterer have never been modified or supplemented.  The truth is that by far the greater part of the house is used only on state occasions.  The host and his family live down-stairs in small, dirty rooms, furnished in a very different, and for them more comfortable, style.  At ordinary times the fine rooms are closed, and the fine furniture carefully covered.

If you make a visite de politesse after an entertainment, you will probably have some difficulty in gaining admission by the front door.  When you have knocked or rung several times, some one will come round from the back regions and ask you what you want.  Then follows another long pause, and at last footsteps are heard approaching from within.  The bolts are drawn, the door is opened, and you are led up to a spacious drawing-room.  At the wall opposite the windows there is sure to be a sofa, and before it an oval table.  At each end of the table, and at right angles to the sofa, there will be a row of three arm-chairs.  The other chairs will be symmetrically arranged round the room.  In a few minutes the host will appear, in his long double-breasted black coat and well-polished long boots.  His hair is parted in the middle, and his beard shows no trace of scissors or razor.

After the customary greetings have been exchanged, glasses of tea, with slices of lemon and preserves, or perhaps a bottle of champagne, are brought in by way of refreshments.  The female members of the family you must not expect to see, unless you are an intimate friend; for the merchants still retain something of that female seclusion which was in vogue among the upper classes before the time of Peter the Great.  The host himself will probably be an intelligent, but totally uneducated and decidedly taciturn, man.

About the weather and the crops he may talk fluently enough, but he will not show much inclination to go beyond these topics.  You may, perhaps, desire to converse with him on the subject with which he is best acquainted—­the trade in which he is himself engaged; but if you make the attempt, you will certainly not gain much information, and you may possibly meet with such an incident as once happened to my travelling companion, a Russian gentleman who had been commissioned by two learned societies to collect information regarding the grain trade.  When he called on a merchant who had promised to assist him in his investigation, he was hospitably received; but when he began to speak about the grain trade of the district the merchant suddenly interrupted him, and proposed to tell him a story.  The story was as follows: