interesting:—

"I left Berlin on Thursday morning at 8.30; the stage through Galicia, Oswiecim, Cracow, Lemberg, Podwoloczyska was a bad twenty-four hours. Just at the frontier the snow was immensely deep, standing in a wall on each side of the train. It was like being let into Russia through the works of a great snow fortification. The worst mistake I made was in bringing no victuals with me. I noticed at the frontier examination that my portmanteau was the only one not half full of food. The restaurants at the large junctions are excellent, being all under the management of Tartars, a race possessing the genius of cookery, but if you have to wait as I did, more than twenty-four hours at an out-of-the-way country station, you may find nothing obtainable but tea. Travelling in Russia is in any case tiring; the distances are interminable, and every journey has to be regarded as a sort of pilgrimage. On coming from Osipoffka here, we had to leave about ten in the evening to meet the desired train.

"The start was rather amusing, for we were a considerable caravan with children, servants, horses and dogs. All night we drove across the Steppe, accompanied by several mounted men with torches, which they lighted when the way was bad.

"I had an outside place and was somewhat dazed and curried by the wind and dust by the time we got to the station. Railway travelling is interesting if you have got the courage not to go first class. The carriages are on the American plan, with an opening down the middle. Instead of dapper bagmen you find long-coated and long-haired Jews, besides soldiers and students in curious costumes, while whole families, travelling together, produce the effect of an emigrant convoy. Everyone undresses with complete sang-froid.

"The family always come for the summer to this estate. It lies in a well-wooded district of Podolia, some hundred miles further north than the region to which I first went. The house is very large, and the garden magnificent. It is skirted by a river and there are primitive boats and an excellent bathing place. They have also a steam-launch of English manufacture, which is shortly to be got afloat.

"The neighbourhood is a paradise of Gipsies. The river throws out arms and endless windings, and the ground between is much broken and covered with undergrowth. Here the Gipsies encamp. One sees them in the evening bathing with their horses, and thus I had an opportunity of observing a thing, the peculiar and suggestive appropriateness of which is remarked on by Darwin in his 'Voyage of the Beagle,' namely, a naked man on a naked horse. This is the true centaur; they become one thing. I am now convinced that the Gipsies are the most physically beautiful of all races. In England they are abject beggars, but here rather more well-to-do than the average of the population; for they are not like the peasants, more than half-starved by ecclesiastical regulation, and obviously, in a country in such a stage as Russia is at present, they have a better time. There are plenty of immense regions where they can trap and fish quite unmolested, and the climate favours their mode of life—doubly, I should imagine, the winter giving a short account of defective constitutions. I suppose they are thieves, but to the casual observer they are entirely admirable. Troops of splendid little brown children go about in the evening singing or shrieking with shrill laughter. Their music, by the way, is valued in Russia. There are several troops who get large sums for attending various festivities.

"It has gradually been borne in upon me that the climate of this region is almost ideal. The sky is deep blue and far off, yet the heat is never really oppressive, on account of a constant breeze which brings balsam from the woods. For the landscape a finer contrast could scarcely be found to the Southern Steppe, which is like the burnt and scraped bottom of a pot. It has a character of its own, of course. From the fact of being usually able to see to the level horizon in all directions, it reminds one of the sea, while in summer the heated and quivering air which rises from the ground produces marvellous atmospheric effects; but there is always a wind, skin-drying and far from healthy. Here, on the other hand, we are well watered and surrounded by deep and lordly forest, and the aspect of the whole country is riant.

"I have not yet seen much of the kirchliches Wesen. The priest at Osipoffka, I gathered, is a man who has to get in a mass as often as he is sober enough. The Abaméleks do not receive him, and never go to Church while there. In any case, I do not think the Princess is particularly dévote. She is of Polish descent, and her family having given up Western Catholicism, have never become, I suppose, enthusiastic as Russian orthodox.

"Of the children the boy is much the most interesting. The eldest girl, though not without promise of beauty, is at present in a somewhat gaping and lumbering stage. The younger one is much smaller, though only a little younger than her sister, also of better intelligence, if worse temper. She laughs with a curious abandon and is full of câlineries, and is two totally different persons when pleased and bored.

"Master Paul has not the faintest resemblance that I can trace to either of them. He is an exceptionally round-limbed and well-made child, with low forehead and hair like dead-black fur showing a dead-white skin between, tending to stand up though perfectly soft, and always with a backward sweep, as though he had lately stood facing a high wind; beady brown eyes, clear brown colour, delicate little nose and chin and a mouth like a cherry, make up a face which is no false promise of his vivacity of temperament. It changes in the hundredth part of a second from bubbling laughter to a sort of Last Judgment seriousness.

"He wags his little tête de Polichinelle over his victuals, and converses with them in several languages. Sometimes his mother interrupts him and asks if he knows what he is saying, when he swears that he hasn't spoken for a quarter of an hour. Pauvre petit bijou she calls him."

In the autumn of 1889 his engagement as tutor ended, and he spent the winter in Odessa to study the language. He put himself, as usual, under conditions where it was impossible to speak any other language; entered a Russian family; prepared his questions in Russian when he shopped; and addressed in Russian the official who delayed his necessary papers until he had silently put down a bribe of two roubles, and who then shook him warmly by the hand. He was full of tales; he told of the English journalist, so aggressively and deliberately English that he would not uncover before the Tsar's portrait in a hairdresser's shop; of the Prince Abamélek, who was always talking of taking him out shooting, but never did so; of the Princess, who feared that her little Paul was "trop jeune encore pour profiter de son esprit eminemment cultivé"; of the social tyranny of Russian orthodoxy, which drove free-thinking persons of quality in the country to church and sacrament at all the Christian festivals; and, finally, of his shortness of funds which forced him to find his way home in humble style.

As an English liberal, Johnstone was naturally a welcome guest in the society of the Reform party; and on his return to England he was to meet Stepniak at the house of their common friend, York Powell, and to enroll himself among the Friends of Russian Freedom. But he was more in sympathy with the members of the Reform movement