and icicles hang round their mouths and from their eyelids. The canals and river are frozen three feet deep, yet that does not prevent the washerwomen from still following their occupation of rinsing the linen in the holes made in the ice. One would think that their fingers would freeze, but the fact is, the water is so much warmer than the air, that they have no fear of that, yet they must surely suffer from standing so many hours on the ice: their loud laughter and rude jokes, however, seem to contradict this opinion. There is a crowd standing further down—what has happened? Let us ask this shopman. “It is only a man in the water, Madam: he has slipped down through the hole in the ice, that is all.” “But why do they not pull him out?” “No one must touch him until the police arrive; it is their business.” “Good heavens! the poor man will be drowned meanwhile.” “Tchto delat?” (what is to be done?) answers the shopman, shrugging his shoulders. And there _is_ nothing done, at least to the purpose; for, of course, in the quarter of an hour or twenty minutes expended in fetching the police, the poor creature has had ample time to be drowned, and his body, when at last fished up from the water by the accredited authorities, is set up on a droshsky with a butitchnick to hold it on, and so is driven, a horrid spectacle, through the streets to the station. This is one of the senseless regulations of the Russian police, that everything must be done by their agency; surely it ought to be lawful to save a fellow-creature’s life under any circumstances. When I was staying at Twer, one of the men-servants, in a fit of jealousy, thought proper to hang himself in an outhouse. One of his companions happened to enter and saw him struggling; he did not dare to cut the cord, but ran to fetch the authorities. They came, and poor Ivan was nearly cold. I recollect, on the road to Nova Derevna, seeing a carriage tear along the stones as if the horses were wild, and the coachman was lashing them like a madman. It appears that he had accidentally run over a drunken man, and was so afraid of the consequences of stopping a moment out of humanity to raise the poor wretch, whose leg was broken, that he thus frantically drove on. If the man had been killed he would have been punished as if for a murder, and the carriage and horses confiscated; but in any case, had he been caught, the latter part of the sentence would have been carried into effect, and he himself would have been severely beaten.