work, and he told me quantities of stories about his country. I always had a taste for low associates," I added calmly. "Alice was an aristocrat from her babyhood, but I was always a vagabond."
He looked somewhat astonished at my declaration, but I changed the subject abruptly.
"There is a frightful ordeal for you to pass through in a few minutes."
"What is it?" he cried, in feigned alarm.
"The baby is to be exhibited. I hear her coming now, and you will have to admire her."
"That is nothing very frightful. It will not be the first time I have done it."
"How difficult it is," I continued, "to induce a Russian nurse to show her charge; and if you say, 'How pretty the child is!' you have cast an evil eye on it, and all sorts of charms are used to counteract your influence."
"It is the same with an adult," responded my companion. "If you tell a Russian woman that she is looking well, it is a bad omen."
"Alice's nurse has always insisted upon it that the child was restless and unhappy all night after we first looked at it; and I believe she has borne us a grudge ever since."
This nurse, I must state, is a type of the picturesque figures which one is constantly coming upon in the streets here. She wears the Russian peasant costume,—a short, dark-blue skirt, with bands of red and white and black braid around it; a white apron, coming to the bottom of the skirt, embroidered about a
