Since my passion for the ballet or for Kscheschinska does not attain the proportions of a twenty-ruble investment, I find it preferable to devote the evening to the always interesting and fruitful hotel studies. What seething life in the numberless corridors, dining-halls, and vestibules of the fashionable St. Petersburg Hotel! Governors in generals' gold-braided uniforms, covered with so many orders and medals that it makes one curious to find out about all the deeds of heroism for which they were bestowed; chamberlains with refined elegance in their gala dress, hiding the "beau restes" of the one-sided Adonis; tall, agile, dark-eyed Circassians with the indispensable cartridge-pouch on the breast region of their long coats, with the dagger hanging in its massive gold sheath from the tightly drawn belt; Cossacks with fur caps a foot high, made of white or black Angora skins, placed on their bristly heads; a nimble Chinese man, or maid, servant, with long pigtail, whose sex it is impossible to distinguish; a whole troop of dark-eyed Khivanese squatting on their prayer-rugs before the apartment of their khan, passing the nargile from hand to hand, and exchanging witticisms about the passing Europeans; beardless Tatar waiters shuffling by in their flat-soled shoes--a mixture of Europe and Asia such as may hardly be seen at once in any other part of the world. The west European merchants and other travellers, who throng the hotel, are scarcely noted among the exotic appearances. In this hotel, as elsewhere throughout St. Petersburg, the European, the civilian, is seemingly merely tolerated. The city belongs to the functionaries, soldiers, officials, and chamberlains, to the Cossacks, Circassians, and, above all others, to the police. More intimate acquaintance reveals that a goodly portion of the uniformed persons in St. Petersburg are ordinary students, technologists, professors, etc., and that these uniformed persons do not equally represent the state. On the contrary, the fight of the state, or, to be more precise, of the police, against the free professions, would not be so bitter if the members of the latter were not entitled to wear uniforms. As it is, they also may appear to the common people as representatives of the Czar's authority.