in different provinces, and is not equally rich. But then the Starosta was well to do; he was not only the head man of the village, but he had shops of his own in Moscow and in St. Petersburg. I noticed that the bride’s fingers were loaded with rings; indeed she seemed to have on all the finery the whole family could muster. As for the bridegroom, he was a good-looking young man of twenty-two or so, and very respectably dressed in the costume of a shopkeeper, which consists of a long blue coat called a caftan, closely buttoned up to the throat. We were presented with tea, coffee, wine, bonbons, cakes, fruit, &c., in succession, all of which we were expected to partake of, or the hosts would think themselves slighted, and their hospitality insulted. The spoons I remarked were of Tula work, and had the appearance of being of gold, but were in reality of silver-gilt, with arabesque flowers all over them, which they say are done with some kind of acid: I believe the secret is not known out of Russia. All the Russian women assembled at this festival were of the upper class of petty shopkeepers or farmers, and they were dressed in the same costume as the bride, with perhaps fewer ornaments. During the whole time we were in the room their amusement consisted in singing, one after the other, in a low kind of chant, songs improvised in honour of the occasion, all the rest of the company sitting silent and motionless as statues. As soon as one had exhausted all her available talent on the subject, another took it up and gave us her ideas upon it. According to one, the bride was too young to be married: she wondered how her mother could part with her, and thought she ought to have kept her at home for a long time yet. Another seemed to think she was doing perfectly right to marry her daughter, after bringing her up so prudently, and making her so clever in household affairs. A third wished to settle the matter entirely by praising the bridegroom; “he was so gay of heart, he loved his bride so well.” His possessions, it appears, were worth having, and enough to tempt a village-maid; for “he had plenty of cows, pigs, and horses;” and as the climax to all these advantages of estates real and personal, she assured us, “that he could take his wife to church in a droshsky!” The whole of the guests remained quite silent, listening with a serious face to the songs; there was no laughing or chatting; each kept her seat and preserved such an intense gravity all the time, that they evidently considered matrimony as no joke after all, and not in the least amusing. Were I malicious, I would remark that they had every one of them been married themselves. After we had remained a reasonable time in the company of the young couple, we went outside to see the guests assembled in the front of the house; there we found several women dancing a wearisome kind of dance, if such it might be called, which consisted in