The markets for second-hand wares play a more important part in Russia than with us, because much greater changes of fortune take place there than in our more solid land. Employes are often displaced, and the wealthy change their places of residence more frequently. In St. Petersburg the trade in rags and rubbish Is carried on in an enclosed place, the Tshukin Dvor ; in Moscow this peculiar stream of social life has It? being along the wall of KItai Gorod, in a broad street extending from one gate to the other in this quarter. In the middle of the street stand tables with all kinds of eatables, and here a dingy long-haired race, bawl and bargain the whole year through, and may be observed at leisure by the stranger, who need not apprehend that he will be surprised in so ungenteel an occupation by any other decently dressed person. The booths next the wall are devoted to antiquities ; old clothes that have strutted througli many a different class of society ; old gold and silver thread, the spoil of some officer's epaulets ; old books whose exteriors toll that they have been made use of. Opposite are the chandlers and picture dealers ; in the middle is a constantly changing tableau that no eye can wIkiHv embrace, nnd no pen describe. The most striking figures arc the tlealers in female attire ; they trail about on their own persons the complete toilette of a dozen maidseivants or peasant-girls ; piling a tower of hats upon their 1 leads, one upon another ; on one side, a huge bundle of lace is pinned, on the other, some twenty ells of gaudy ribbons flutter in the breeze ; over their shoulders hang garments of every fashion for the last ten years, and shawls in as many strata as a dish of Livonian pancakes ; and beside these, they hang and roll round their bodies as many choice articles of clothing as can be hung and rolled together. Men may be seen equipped in like manner in masculine habiliments.
But all dealers are not so richly provided ; individuals are to be seen dragging about a solitary old coat the whole day long, sounding its praises unweariedly ; one old man with a snow-white beard was lovingly clasping a large picture of some saint, who, he hoped, would favour him so far as to let him earn a dinner by exchanging him for money.
Those who love to feel a nation's pulse or the bumps of its leading follies m its scull, should not fail to study the picture-booths. These remarkable productions of native fancy are of very old existence in Russia, and untouched as yet by any European improvement, continue in the purest and most unadulterated Russian taste. All are more or less of a religious or rather a mythological natm^e. The most celebrated occurrences from the creation to the last new miracle of Voronesh, all so palpably depicted in red, yellow, and green, that the most stiff-necked infidel in the world must needs believe. It seemed to me as if the kingdom of the devil were much larger than that of the angels in these pictures ; for death, the devil, and his adjutant (Gospodin Strap tshik, as he is here generally called), were much oftener to be met with than seraphim and cherubim. The monsters of the Apocalypse, and the Babylonian, Assyrian, Macedonian and Roman empires, Avere very frequent. If these look odd enough in Greek, it may be imagined what effect they must produce when translated into the Russian of a Muscovite peasant. The original type may have come from Greece, and may be yet found on the walls of church and cloisters, whence they have been copied by the wood carvers, who have added some witticisms of their own. I saw, for example, in the Novospasski convent in Moscow, the four chief monarchies of the world with long coiled-up tails, and monstrous jaws filled with dragons' teeth, sitting together quite familiarly like so many house-spiders.