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a saint, adorned with jewels, and there was obliged to
take a solemn oath that the treasury of the state should
be sacred to him. He took the oath readily; but by a
strange accident, it is added, after the ceremony, some
diamonds and rubies were missing from the vestments of
the saint. This story is of about the same kind as the
accounts which are found in the Russian national songs,
— of how the Cossack chief Platof pays a visit to the
Emperor Napoleon, in Paris, disguised as a merchant,
gives the Frenchman a description of himself, then leaps
upon his horse and rides away before the emperor’s nose.
But the story is, nevertheless, indicative of the suspicion
which the continual robbery of the public funds by
officials has created among the people, even towards men in
the highest places. A foreign author, who had described
the Russian situation in Poland as that, when eighty
thousand rubles were appropriated for a road, forty
thousand must go into the pockets of the officials,
repeatedly heard in St. Petersburg the answer: “Lucky
fellows, those Poles, if it is really the case there! Since
here, when eighty thousand rubles are appropriated for a
road, eighty thousand goes into the pockets of the
officials.”
Since the Zemstvos have been deprived of jurisdiction
throughout the land, it would seem that stealing goes on,
regardless of consequences, in the most barefaced
manner. It appears to the common people as if every
disorder on the part of the officials escaped punishment now
more than ever before.
By the side of Vyshnegradski sat a patron of literature,
— a general in uniform, with a face as red as a
lobster, and faience eyes, and expressed his good wishes for
lyric and novelistic literature of the right kind in and
out of Russia.
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