[Illustration: Kissing.] All Russia breaks out now into an Oriental exuberance of kisses. What arithmetic shall undertake to compute the osculatory expenditure? Every member of a family salutes every other member with a kiss. All acquaintances, however slight, greet with a kiss and a _Christohs vosskress_. Long-robed _mujiks_ mingle beards and kisses, or brush their hirsute honors over the faces of their female acquaintances. In the public offices all the _employées_ salute each other and their superiors. So in the army. The general embraces and kisses all the officers of the corps; the colonel of a regiment those beneath him, besides a deputation of the soldiers; and the captain salutes all the men of his company. The Czar does duty at Easter. He must of course salute his family and retinue, his court and attendants. But this is not all. On parade he goes through the ceremony with his officers, and a selected body of privates, who stand as representatives of the rest, and even with the sentinels at the palace gates. So amid smiles and handshakings, and exclamations of “Christ has arisen!” pass on the days of the Easter festival. Ample amends are made for the long abstinence of the Great Fast, by unbounded indulgence in the coveted animal food, to say nothing of the copious libations of brandy—evidences of which are visible enough in groups of amateur street-sweepers who subsequently are seen plying their brooms in the early morning hours. Such is St. Petersburg, when most Russian. A LOVE AFFAIR AT CRANFORD. I am tempted to relate it, as having interested me in a quiet sort of way, and as being the latest intelligence of Our Society at Cranford. I thought, after Miss Jenkyns’s death, that probably my connection with Cranford would cease; at least that it would have to be kept up by correspondence, which bears much the same relation to personal intercourse that the books of dried plants I sometimes see (“Hortus Siccus,” I think they call the thing), do to the living and fresh flowers in the lanes and meadows. I was pleasantly surprised, therefore, by receiving a letter from Miss Pole (who had always come in for a supplementary week after my annual visit to Miss Jenkyns), proposing that I should go and stay with her; and then, in a couple of days after my acceptance, came a note from Miss Matey, in which, in a rather circuitous and very humble manner, she told me how much pleasure I should confer, if I could spend a week or two with her, either before or after I had been at Miss Pole’s; “for,” she said, “since my dear sister’s death, I am well aware I have no attractions to offer; it is only to the kindness of my friends that I can owe their company.”