The Jews in Chatham Street, New York, who press their wares upon the notice of passers by, are modest compared with the vendors of old clothes and miscellaneous matters in the markets of Moscow. It was hard to get away from them without making an investment in the most undesirable of all worldly goods,—a coat that somebody else had cast off. And such a jumble of things! reminding one of the sign on the country store window-shutter of an alliterative dealer: “Bibles, Blackball, Butter, Testaments, Tar, Treacle, Godly-books, and Gimlets, for sale here.” Ironware, pot-metal, in the shape of utensils for cooking, seemed to abound; and if the poorer people, who are the buyers here, have any thing to cook, it is very pleasant to know it. Their food is mainly milk, eggs, pickles, cabbage, and black bread, with beef and mutton according to their ability to buy it. As a general thing the Russian peasants are not underfed; the land being so largely in the immediate care of the laborer himself, he can manage to get food for himself and family. And as they clothe themselves in the rudest and most primitive way, literally using skins of beasts, and in their natural state, they ought to be able to live comfortably without handling much money.
The “Riding School” of Moscow is the building in which a remarkable museum is gathered. This building is one of the longest with an unbroken area in the world, the roof, without a column to support it, covering a space 560 feet long and 160 wide. It is constructed on this enormous scale for the exercise of regiments, cavalry and foot, in winter, when the weather is so severe as to render drills out of doors impossible. The Ethnological Society of the North of Europe had selected this place—and it was my good fortune to be here at the time—for the exhibition of the Slavonic races in wax! Here they are in all their varied employments, according to the climate, habits, and necessities of the several peoples; with their actual surroundings of forest, ice, snow, sea, river; the men, women, and children, with dogs, poultry, oxen, reindeer, and sledges, hunting and fishing, freezing and trying to keep warm, marrying and trading and travelling; here are Albanian costumes, and there a cavern and human skeletons sitting in it, telling a story I could not understand, and here a cottage out of whose roof the smoke curls gracefully, and the open door and chickens and children playing near, need no interpreter to speak of comfort and content.