Palm Sunday is another very agreeable interruption of the great fast. The children's festival, which in Germany occurs at Christmas, is in Russia celebrated on Palm Sunday. The scene of this pretty fair is under the arcades of the great " Gostinnoi Dvor," and in the adjoining streets. Huge bundles of twigs are brought into the city by the peasants, some very small, while others are great branches, almost as big as young trees, to suit the various amounts of piety ; for while the severe orthodox father buys a whole tree which he gets blessed in the church, and afterwards suspends under the pictures of his saints, his elegant son contents himself with a delicate Httle twig, which he cracks like any ordinary whip. To these natural foundations are appended tlie palms which art has constructed to aid the poverty of a northern April. The bare twig is furnished with an abundance of leaves and flowers, some copied from nature, and some the production of a lively fancy. Some are made like the branches of fruit-trees, and hung with all the fruits of the east imitated in wax, with waxen birds and waxen angels fastened to the boughs with sky-blue ribbons.
A great number of natural flowers are also brought from the numerous hot-houses of St. Petersburg, centifolia, moss-roses, violets, hyacinths, and orange flowers, for the elder sisters, who are not content to leave the fair with none but artificial flowers. As flowers alone would not be acceptable to children, sweetmeats and playthings are also to be had in abundance. The Russians have a peculiar talent for making figures and toys out of the most worthless materials in the world ; straw, shavings, ice, dough, they turn all to account. One old discharged soldier had made a model of a full-iigged frigate ; all sails were set, and it was so large, that as he walked about with it on his head, it seemed as if the vessel were sailing away with him towed at the cable. Another seemed to prefer the more peaceful reminiscences of his childhood to those of the service, and had formed a complete Russian farmhouse with all its appurtenances out of wood and straw. In the farm-yard a man was at work upon a sledge, perhaps his old father ; an old woman was at the door with her pails, preparing to go to the spring, and among the cows in the cowhouse sat a young girl, evidently his mother and sister. Another very favourite model is that of a church, with all the cupolas, turrets, crosses and chains peculiar to the exterior of a Russian church. Churches occupy a large space in a Russian imagination ; and where we, with a pencil or piece of chalk in our hands, in an idle moment, would write mitials, or draw a caricature, a Russian would be almost sm-e to draw a church. All Jerusalem is sometimes to be seen surrounded by its palm groves, and the multitude entering the city with palm -branches in their hands. The servants of a family make quantities of such things for the children ; and what the dextrous fingers of the lackey form out of paper, the cook fashions of sugar. The rich uncles and godfathers send the children palm-branches at this feast that are sometimes worth some hundreds of dollars. On such branches the angels are perhaps gold, the leaves silver, and the hollow waxen fruits fiUod with costly trifles.
The stalls for the sale, or rather the exchange, of saints' pictures, images, &c. &c., for the Russian must not sell the picture of a saint, though he may exchange it, which he does sometimes for money, are also provided with a multitude of amulets, crosses, &c., of all possible sizes, forms, and materials ; and if a person is not inclined to load himself with a heavier cross, he at least takes one of gingerbread, which he has the advantage of being able to eat when he is tired of carrying it.
The dealers in plaster-ofParis figures throng here in greater numbers than in their Italian father-land. I saw one morning an odd rencontre between two servants, one with a basket full of paper shavings, out of which peeped the figure of Gothe, after Rauch, with his hands behind his back ; while the other had bought for his master a plaster Napoleon, — a very fashionable figure, by the by, among Russian officers, from the Caucasus to Siberia. The latter held his Napoleon in liis arms, and, as the lowest Russians are always full of compliments, he was making a profusion of bows, which Napoleon was forced to make with him. It looked exactly as if the ex-emperor were complimenting Gothe, who listened gravely to him buried up to his chin in cuttings of paper.