The funniest moments were when the bride’s father sat on the floor pretending he was drunk, and when the bridegroom, to prove he was not tipsy, crawled under the table on all fours among the guests’ feet and went from one end to the other, and then jumped up and gave a military salute. They drank too much. They were near quarrelling at the end. One of the guests shouted in a loud voice that Katia’s brother had played the piano like a bootmaker. Then the toasts! They drank twice to everybody in the room, and the men kissed the hands of the women as well as clinking glasses with them. All the bridegroom said at dinner was, “So-and-so, for what reason do you not drink?” though So-and-so was often half-seas over. They drank to absent friends, to Freedom, to Truth, to English Literature—“Let us drink to English Literature, ‘urrah!”—to Russian dancing, to Katia, to Katia’s figure (“thank God she isn’t like a telegraph pole”), to Katia’s future happiness. She changed her dress between dinner and dessert. Some of the women present had a private view of the bride’s linen—eight dozen chemises at a hundred and forty roubles the dozen, and all the rest on a similar scale. “Fine batiste and lace,” said an old lady present, rubbing her fingers together as if feeling the linen; “fine batiste that at the first wash goes into shreds from the chemicals the laundresses use. I wouldn’t accept such garments as a gift. It is a sin to wear them. Nowadays, when you live in a city and the washerwoman won’t wash naturally, the only thing to do is to wear cheap things and replace them continually.” What was interesting to me was the complete absence of attention on the part of the bridegroom. He could not have treated an enemy more negligently. It even prompted the German governess, who had unfortunately got a little drunk with champagne, to cry out— “The bridegroom has not kissed the bride once; why is it?” Poor Katia! she did not seem to have one true friend amongst all these people, and was possibly marrying to escape from father and home.... But away from these problems! Thousands of sleigh-horses flog the grey-white snow of the Kief streets, flocked with Christmas traffic. The sleighs are loaded with baskets of cakes and sweets. Men are driving, carrying in their arms huge Christmas trees. There are men struggling with little pigs and live geese and turkeys designed for the market or the Christmas dinner. On the slippery sidewalks urchins are crying with cheerful irrelevance:— “Five copecks, aluminium wonder lights, cold fire without smoke, without smell.” “Five copecks, warm socks to put inside boots or goloshes.”