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elbow; fear and trembling will assail your heart lest even some careless breath of yours might injure this most wondrous product of nature and art. And what ladies’ sleeves you will meet in the Nevski Prospect! Ach, what perfection! They are rather like two air balloons so that the lady might suddenly float up in the air, if she was not supported by a gentleman; because it is as easy and pleasant to lift a lady in the air as to lift a glass of champagne to one’s lips. In no other place do two people bow so graciously and readily as they do in the Nevski Prospect. Here you will meet unique smiles, the products of the highest art, now a smile to make you melt with delight, now one which makes you feel lower than the grass and forces you to bow your head, and again a smile to make you feel taller than the spire of the Admiralty and hold your head high. Here you will meet people who converse of a concert or the weather with an exceptional air of breeding and a sense of their own importance. Here you will meet with a thousand inscrutable temperaments and phenomena. God, what strange types are to be found in the Nevski Prospect! There are a great number of people who, when they meet you, invariably glance at your shoes and if you pass them, they look back so that they can see your coat-tails. I can’t understand why to this day. At first, I thought they were cobblers, but this was quite wrong however; for the most part they work in different official departments, the majority of them can write an address from one government office to another in the most perfect manner, or else they are people who occupy their time with strolling about and reading papers in teashops—in a word, for the most part they are all respectable people. In this blessed time between two and three o’clock in the afternoon, a time which could be called the focal point of the Nevski Prospect, the main exhibition of all man’s best creations takes place. One shows off a modish frock-coat with the best beaver fur, another a perfect Greek nose, a third carries a pair of peerless side-whiskers, then a lady—two pretty eyes and an amazing little hat, a fifth has a signet ring with a talisman on his elegant little finger, another lady—a foot in a charming slipper, a seventh has an astonishing cravat, an eighth—a moustache to plunge one into stupefaction. But as soon as it strikes three the exhibition is over and the crowd grows thin.
    At three o’clock there is a fresh change. It is suddenly spring in the Nevski Prospect: it becomes thronged with clerks in green uniforms. Hungry titular councillors, aulic councillors and other kinds of councillors do their utmost to quicken their pace. Young collegiate registrars and provincial and collegiate secretaries make haste to seize the opportunity of strolling along the Nevski Prospect in a dignified manner calculated to show that they have not sat for six hours in a council chamber at all. But the old collegiate secretaries and titular and aulic councillors walk quickly with bent heads: they have no time for examining the passers-by; they have not yet broken completely with their tasks; their heads are full of paraphernalia and whole archives of business begun and left unfinished ; for a long time they see boxes of papers or the stout face of the head of the Chancellor’s office instead of signboards.
    After four o’clock the Nevski Prospect is empty and you will not be likely to meet a single clerk. A sempstress from one of the shops may run across the Nevski Prospect with a box in her arms; some pathetic prey for a humanitarian person, sent about the world in a frieze cloak; an odd stranger to the town to whom all hours are alike; some tall, thin Englishwoman with a reticule and a book in her hands; a Russian workman in a demicoton overcoat with a waist somewhere up his back and a narrow beard, who has spent his whole life hurrying and in whom everything shakes, back,