It was extraordinary how the Russians clung to the idea that they had secured the aid of America[22] to save them from their embarrassments. They spoke of the help they were to receive with as much assurance as if a treaty had already been signed on the subject, and they appeared to regard the President of the United States with as much respect as a sailor does his sheet-anchor in a storm. To do the Americans justice, they took all the advances in perfectly good faith, and rather encouraged the hope: they were courted in all companies, feasted, petted, and, as they say, “made much of,” and seemed rather pleased than otherwise. It is odd that citizens of a republican nation such as that of the States should have so great a reverence for titles, orders, stars, and the like trumpery, for surely, if a person _be_ a gentleman in the proper sense of the word, it is not necessary that he be ticketed as such like a prize-ox in a cattle-show; and in Russia, above every other country, a glittering star, or a cross suspended by à scarlet ribbon round the neck, would be a most fallacious criterion that the wearer merited so high an appellation. Indeed it often happens that the subjects of the Czar, the breast of whose coat is like a cushion, on which all the family jewels are pinned, have the vilest souls and the blackest hearts, together with the most empty heads, in his dominions. I do not know if a foreigner would not really form a more correct estimate of their character if he judged of their baseness by the number of orders they display. The Americans in St. Petersburg did not seem to think so, for, the very morning I left it, one of the attachés of their embassy showed my friends, with the greatest exultation, the Easter eggs with which the Princess so-and-so, the Countess such-an-one, and several officials of high rank about the court, had presented him: he also exhibited the portraits of the whole of the Imperial family, which he intended to hang up, he said, “as household treasures, when he returned to New York,” whither he was going “right away,” as he assured us. The Russians, upon the strength of their hopes, were always threatening us with the American fleet in the Baltic, which would place the Allied fleets between two enemies. Is the old adage about extremes meeting really so near the truth? Whether there were any substantial foundations to all these castles in the air, we had no means of knowing. The French have a proverb, “Il n’y a pas de fumée sans feu.”