" Slip your arms into your fur sleeves, and button your beaver collar close about your ears," said my companion to me, the first time I ventured into the ruinok, for I had allowed those articles of my wardrobe to hang loosely behind, as is the usual custom in Russia. " We are here," he continued, " in the thieves' quarter of St. Petersburg, and every thing that is left loose is considered a fair prize. Put your rings into your pocket, for there are those who would cut off your finger for the sake of the gold ; and if it was known where you carried your pocket-book, you would have a hole in your cloak immediately." Indeed common fame says that people have sometimes been strangely clipped and cut by the hordes that occupy these wild regions ; but as far as I am concerned, I am bound to say that nothing of the kind ever happened to me, though I have often enough, and carelessly enough, wandered through the mazes of this great labyrinth of a fair.
Here also, in the true Russian spirit, like has paired with like. In one corner, for instance, all the dealers in sacred images have congregated. The Russians, who believe themselves abandoned by God and all good angels^ as soon as they are without His visible and tangible presence, or, rather, who think every place the Devil's own ground, until the priest has driven him out of it, and who, therefore, decorate their bodies, their rooms, their doors, and their gates, as well as their churches, with sacred images, require, of course, a very large and constant supply of the article, of which, in fact, the consumption is enormous. The little brass crosses, and the Virgins, the St. Johns, the St. Georges, and other amulets, may be seen piled up in boxes like gingerbread nuts at a fair. On the walls of the booths are hung up pictures of all sorts and sizes, radiant with mock gold and silver. Some are only a few inches in length and breadth. Of these a nobleman's footman will buy a few score at a time, as necessary to the fitting up of a new liouse, for in every room a few of these holy little articles must be nailed up against the wall. For village churches, for private chapels, and for devout merchants of the old faith, there are pictures of several ells square, before which a whole household may prostrate themselves at their ease. Some are neatly set in mahoganyframes of modern fashion, others are still adorned in the good old style with pillars, doors, and temples of silver wire ; S(mie are new, and from the pencils of students of the newly-established St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, but the greater part are old, and present figures often nearly obliterated by the dust and smoke of centuries. To these it is, particularly when they can be warranted to have once adorned the ^^ all of a church, that the lower orders in Russia attach the greatest value, just as our German peasants prefer an old, dirty, well-thumbed hymn-book, to one just fresh from the binder's.
In another part of the market will be found a whole quarter of fruitshops, in which an incredible quantity of dried fruit is oflPered for sale. Each of these shops is as oddly decorated as its fellows. In the centre, on an elevated pedestal, there stands generally a rich battery of bottles and boxes of conserves, mostly manufactured at Kiejff. Round the walls, in small boxes, the currants, raisins, almonds, figs, and oranges are arranged, while huge sacks and chests of prunes, nuts, and juniper-berries, retire more modestly into corners ; and large tuns full of glukvi^ a small red berry of which the Russians are passionately fond, stand sentinels at the door. These are mostly sold in winter, when they are generally frozen to the consistency of flint stones, and are measured out with wooden shovels to amateurs. Inside and outside, these shops are decorated with large festoons of mushrooms, at all times a favourite dish with the common people in Russia. I am surprised that no good artist should ever have chosen one of these picturesque Russian fruit-shops for the subject of his pencil. Such a booth, with its bearded dealers and its no less bearded customers, would make an admirable tableau de genre ; but the painters of St. Petersburg, I suppose, find it more profitable to cover their canvass with one insipid set of features after another, and to expend all the gorgeousness of their colouring on the uniforms and diamonds of the upper strata of society.