PREFACE. WITHOUT troubling the reader with any account of a sea voyage from England to Archangel, as all travels on the "vasty deep" present pretty much the same features which have been so frequently and so well described by others, I will only observe that circumstances induced me to reside for more than ten years in Russia, which I have only recently quitted. The following pages contain a simple account of the manners, customs, and genre de vie chez eux of a people whose domestic habits are comparatively but little known to the English nation. Of the truth of many of the anecdotes I can assure the reader; others I have had from good authority, and I have every reason to believe that they are veracious. The names of persons that are inserted in the text are not those of Russian families: the Russians, like the ancient Greeks, have a termination denoting parentage; the syllables vitch for the masculine, and ovna for the feminine, are merely equivalent to the classic ides. Thus, Dmitri Ivanovitch, means Demetrius the son of Ivan; Cleopatra Ivanovna, Cleopatra the daughter of |