When I left St. Petersburg I thought I would find a very good road. All those who have travelled upon it after the Emperor have thought so. It had been such, indeed, but only for a short time. The dirt which had been put upon the road in dry weather in order to make it even had been washed by the rains, forming a swamp in the summer, and made it impassable. Fearing bad weather, I got out of the kibítka and went into the post station, intending to take a rest. In the room I found a traveller who was sitting behind a long, common peasant table in the nearer corner and was turning over some papers. He asked the Post Commissary to give him horses as soon as possible. To my question who he was, I learned that he was a pettifogger of the old style, and that he was going to St. Petersburg with a stack of torn papers which he was then examining. I immediately entered into a conversation with him, and here is what he said: “Dear sir,--I, your humble servant, have been a Registrar in the Archives of the Estates, where I had an opportunity to make good use of my position: by assiduous labour I have collected a genealogy, based on clear documentary proof, of many Russian families, and I can trace their princely or noble origin several centuries back. I can reinstate many a man in his princely dignity, by showing his origin from Vladímir Monomákh, or even from Rúrik. Dear sir,” he continued, as he pointed to his papers, “all Great-Russian nobles ought to purchase my work, paying for it more than for any other wares. But with the leave of your High Birth, Noble Birth, or High and Noble Birth, for I do not know how to honour you, they do not know what they need. You know how the orthodox Tsar Feódor Aleksyéevich of blessed memory has injured the Russian nobility by doing away with the prefecture. That severe legislation placed many honourable princely and royal families on a level with the Nóvgorod nobility. But the orthodox Emperor Peter the Great has entirely put them in the shade by his Table of Ranks. He opened the way to all for obtaining the title of nobility through military and civil service, and he, so to say, has trampled the old nobility in the dirt. Our Most Gracious Mother, now reigning, has confirmed the former decrees by her august Law of the Nobility, which has very much disquieted all our higher nobles, for the old families are placed in the Book of the Nobility lower than the rest. There is, however, a rumour that there will soon be issued a supplementary decree by which those families that can trace their noble origin two or three hundred years back will be granted the title of Marquis or something like it, so that they will have some distinguishing feature from the other families. For this reason, dear sir, my work must be acceptable to all the old nobility. But there are rascals everywhere. In Moscow I fell in with a company of young gentlemen to whom I proposed my work, in order