The Gypsies | Page 9

shall talk with them as much as you like. Once, in Moscow, I got together all in the town--perhaps a hundred and fifty--to entertain the American minister, Curtin. That was a very hard thing to do,--there was so much professional jealousy among them, and so many quarrels. Would you have believed it?"
I thought of the feuds between sundry sturdy Romanys in England, and felt that I could suppose such a thing, without dangerously stretching my faith, and I began to believe in Russian gypsies.
"Well, then, I shall call for you to-morrow night with a troika; I will come early,--at ten. They never begin to sing before company arrive at eleven, so that you will have half an hour to talk to them."
It is on record that the day on which the general gave me this kind invitation was the coldest known in St. Petersburg for thirty years, the thermometer having stood, or rather having lain down and groveled that morning at 40 degrees below zero, Fahr. At the appointed hour the troika, or three-horse sleigh, was before the Hotel d'Europe. It was, indeed, an arctic night, but, well wrapped in fur-lined shubas, with immense capes which fall to the elbow or rise far above the head, as required, and wearing fur caps and fur-lined gloves, we felt no cold. The beard of our istvostshik, or driver, was a great mass of ice, giving him the appearance of an exceedingly hoary youth, and his small horses, being very shaggy and thoroughly frosted, looked in the darkness like immense polar bears. If the general and myself could only have been considered as gifts of the slightest value to anybody, I should have regarded our turn-out, with the driver in his sheep-skin coat, as coming within a miracle of resemblance to that of Santa Claus, the American Father Christmas.
On, at a tremendous pace, over the snow, which gave out under our runners that crunching, iron sound only heard when the thermometer touches zero. There is a peculiar fascination about the troika, and the sweetest, saddest melody and most plaintive song of Russia belong to it.

THE TROIKA.
Vot y'dit troika udalaiya.
Hear ye the troika-bell a-ringing, And see the peasant driver there? Hear ye the mournful song he's singing, Like distant tolling through the air?
"O eyes, blue eyes, to me so lonely, O eyes--alas!--ye give me pain; O eyes, that once looked at me only, I ne'er shall see your like again.
"Farewell, my darling, now in heaven, And still the heaven of my soul; Farewell, thou father town, O Moscow, Where I have left my life, my all!"
And ever at the rein still straining, One backward glance the driver gave; Sees but once more a green low hillock, Sees but once more his loved one's grave.
"Stoi!"--Halt! We stopped at a stylish-looking building, entered a hall, left our skubas, and I heard the general ask, "Are the gypsies here?" An affirmative being given, we entered a large room, and there, sure enough, stood six or eight girls and two men, all very well dressed, and all unmistakably Romany, though smaller and of much slighter or more delicate frame than the powerful gypsy "travelers" of England. In an instant every pair of great, wild eyes was fixed on me. The general was in every way a more striking figure, but I was manifestly a fresh stranger, who knew nothing of the country, and certainly nothing of gypsies or gypsydom. Such a verdant visitor is always most interesting. It was not by any means my first reception of the kind, and, as I reviewed at a glance the whole party, I said within myself:--
"Wait an instant, you black snakes, and I will give you something to make you stare."
This promise I kept, when a young man, who looked like a handsome light Hindoo, stepped up and addressed me in Russian. I looked long and steadily at him before I spoke, and then said:--
"Latcho divvus prala!" (Good day, brother.)
"What is that?" he exclaimed, startled.
"Tu jines latcho adosta." (You know very well.) And then, with the expression in his face of a man who has been familiarly addressed by a brazen statue, or asked by a new-born babe, "What o'clock is it?" but with great joy, he cried:--
"Romanichal!"
In an instant they were all around me, marveling greatly, and earnestly expressing their marvel, at what new species of gypsy I might be; being in this quite unlike those of England, who, even when they are astonished "out of their senses" at being addressed in Romany by a gentleman, make the most red-Indian efforts to conceal their amazement. But I speedily found that these Russian gypsies were as unaffected and child-like as they were gentle in manner, and that they compared with our own prize-fighting, sturdy-begging, always-suspecting Romany roughs and rufianas as a