* Those proprietors who kept orchestras, large packs of
     hounds, &c., had sometimes several hundred domestic serfs.

The number of these domestic serfs being generally out of all proportion to the amount of work they had to perform, they were imbued with a hereditary spirit of indolence, and they performed lazily and carelessly what they had to do.  On the other hand, they were often sincerely attached to the family they served, and occasionally proved by acts their fidelity and attachment.  Here is an instance out of many for which I can vouch.  An old nurse, whose mistress was dangerously ill, vowed that, in the event of the patient’s recovery, she would make a pilgrimage, first to Kief, the Holy City on the Dnieper, and afterwards to Solovetsk, a much revered monastery on an island in the White Sea.  The patient recovered, and the old woman, in fulfilment of her vow, walked more than two thousand miles!

This class of serfs might well be called domestic slaves, but I must warn the reader that he ought not to use the expression when speaking with Russians, because they are extremely sensitive on the point.  Serfage, they say, was something quite different from slavery, and slavery never existed in Russia.

The first part of this assertion is perfectly true, and the second part perfectly false.  In old times, as I have said above, slavery was a recognised institution in Russia as in other countries.  One can hardly read a few pages of the old chronicles without stumbling on references to slaves; and I distinctly remember—­though I cannot at this moment give chapter and verse—­that one of the old Russian Princes was so valiant and so successful in his wars that during his reign a slave might be bought for a few coppers.  As late as the beginning of last century the domestic serfs were sold very much as domestic slaves used to be sold in countries where slavery was recognised as a legal institution.  Here is an example of the customary advertisement; I take it almost at random from the Moscow Gazette of 1801:—­“To be sold:  three coachmen, well trained and handsome; and two girls, the one eighteen, and the other fifteen years of age, both of them good-looking, and well acquainted with various kinds of handiwork.  In the same house there are for sale two hairdressers; the one, twenty-one years of age, can read, write, play on a musical instrument, and act as huntsman; the other can dress ladies’ and gentlemen’s hair.  In the same house are sold pianos and organs.”

A little farther on in the same number of the paper, a first-rate clerk, a carver, and a lackey are offered for sale, and the reason assigned is a superabundance of the articles in question (za izlishestvom).  In some instances it seems as if the serfs and the cattle were intentionally put in the same category, as in the following announcement:  “In this house one can buy a coachman and a Dutch cow about to calve.”  The style of these advertisements, and the frequent recurrence of the same addresses, show that there was at this time in Moscow a regular class of slave-dealers.  The humane Alexander I. prohibited advertisements of this kind, but he did not put down the custom which they represented, and his successor, Nicholas I., took no effective measures for its repression.