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, for our admiration.

“We are inhabitants of America.  Is the likeness very strong?” we asked.

The crowd tittered softly; the man looked frightened; but finding that no dire fate threatened, he was soon vociferating again, with a roguish grin:—­

“Kupiti, kupi-i-iti!  Prevoskhodniya Amerikanskiya zhiteli!  Sa-a-miya nastoyashtschiya!”—­Buy, buy, splendid natives of America! the most genuine sort!

Far behind this Gostinny Dvor extends a complex mass of other curious “courts” and markets, all worthy of a visit for the popular types which they afford of the lower classes.  Among them all none is more steadily and diversely interesting, at all seasons of the year, than the Syennaya Ploshtschad,—­the Haymarket,—­so called from its use in days long gone by.  Here, in the Fish Market, is the great repository for the frozen food which is so necessary in a land where the church exacts a sum total of over