sofa, which is so dirty that the silk with which it is covered is almost invisible; their clothing is so abominably unclean, that it is quite offensive; and they live “littéralement de pommes de terre,” as we were often assured. Yet when these people go out their filthy underclothing is hidden by a showy silk gown and cloak _à la mode_. They pay visits in their own carriages, which are wormeaten and worn, with four horses half-starved—a coachman, footman, and postilion in miserably soiled and tarnished liveries; they look down with contempt upon respectable merchants and shopkeepers, and, to use a vulgar expression, they turn up their nose at the industrious, “parce que leur naissance est noble.” I shall never forget the disdain with which one of these second-rate people mentioned one day at dinner that an English merchant in St. Petersburg had made her daughter an offer; “but how was it possible?” she said, “un homme qui n’est pas noble!” The sleeping apartments in the houses of very rich people are elegantly arranged and separate from the drawing-rooms; but in many they form a part of the suite of salons. They are divided by an ornamental screen from the other part of the room, so that a stranger may frequently have been in them without having had the least idea that they were the sleeping-rooms. Each room is heated by a kind of oven, which, when the wood is burned to ashes, is shut down so as to confine all the warm air and prevent it from escaping, and thus an equal temperature is ensured. If this stove happen to be closed too soon, the vapour diffused through the apartment is extremely injurious, being the fumes of charcoal, which find no egress from the double windows, and produce a terrible headache, and a sensation as if water were running over the brain: it is soon cured by being a short time in the open air.