I had as my companions on this journey, two Russian gentlemen, with whom afterwards, at several points of my tour, I came into contact. They were urbane and intelligent men, full of their own country and of the Czar, yet professing great respect for England, which they had just visited, and looking down with a contempt they were at little pains to conceal, upon the Frenchmen and Italians among whom they were moving. They possessed the sobriety of mind, the turn for quiet, shrewd observation, in short, much of the physical and intellectual stamina, of Englishmen, with just a shade less of the exquisite polish which marks the latter wherever they are met with. These, no doubt, were favourable specimens of the Russian nation; but it is such men who give the tone to a State, while the masses below execute their designs. I have ever since felt that, should we ever meet that people on the field of battle, the contest would be no ordinary one. I recollect one of these gentlemen meeting me on the streets of Rome some weeks afterwards, and informing me that he had been the day before to visit the ball on the top of St Peter's, and that he had been delighted at seeing his Emperor's name, in his Emperor's own handwriting, inside the ball, with a few lines beneath the signature, stating that he had stood in that ball, and had there prayed for Mother Holy Russia,--a fact full of significance. About mid-day we came, wet, and weary, and cold, to the Duana on the Tuscan frontier, where was a poor inn, at which, after our passports had been viseed, and our trunks and carpet-bags plumbed, we dined. There were some twenty of us at table; a priest taking the top, and the _conducteur_ the bottom. I remember that two persons of the party kept their hats on at table, and that these were the priest and a poor country lad,--the priest because he presided perhaps, and the countryman because, not knowing the etiquette of the point, he wisely determined to follow in that, as in greater matters, the priest. Our dinner consisted of coarse broth, black bread, buffalo beef, and wine of not the sweetest flavour; but what helped us was an excellent appetite, for we had not breakfasted beyond a few chestnuts and grapes picked up at the poor villages through which we passed. We obtained, however, an hour's shelter from the elements.