Warsaw is a beautiful and fashionable city when considered apart from the sections where the Jews are crowded together. The members of its elegant society know how to live in spite of national misery and oppression. Hotel Bristol, the finest hotel in the city, is their rendezvous. Here they meet one another at breakfast, at dinner, in the splendid English dining-room; men and women, guests from Prussian-Poland and Galicia, noble families of the partitioned kingdom. They are of one race, one class, one caste; they know one another, like members of the same club, and all approximately the same type--somewhat overslender forms, long, nervous hands, finely sculptured noses, sharply chiselled temples, angular foreheads, the women supple and lissome, each motion accompanied by a touch of polished affectation. When compared with this Polish aristocracy, the Russian officers, who eat at separate tables, leave the impression, with their German scholar-faces or Cossack physiognomies, of provincial backwardness. They are merely bourgeois in uniform even though they be real princes, while the Pole who has graduated from that high-school of refinement, the Jesuit boarding-school, is an aristocrat, a cavalier, from head to foot. They remain separate like oil and water. The Russian, even though he is the master, is of no consequence here. It is only necessary to observe for the space of an hour from some corner of the elegant dining-room of Hotel Bristol the behavior of the Polish society and the complete isolation of the Russian officers or officials; it is only necessary to be able to distinguish the groups from one another--the Baltic nobility with their almost bourgeois families, merchants from all the principal countries, Russian functionaries, and Polish society--and it will at once become clear who is at home here, firmly rooted to the soil, so that all others become strangers and intruders; it is the Poles and the Poles alone.