Page:Notes upon Russia (volume 2, 1851).djvu/166

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138
NOTES UPON RUSSIA.

by the irritated and maddened bears, they run to the prince, crying, "See, my lord, we are wounded". To which the prince replies, "Go, I will show you favour", and then he orders them to be taken care of, and clothes and certain measures of corn to be given them.

Moreover, when the time was come for us to receive our discharge and to be dismissed, we were honourably invited, as before, to dinner, and conducted to the palace. Each of us also was presented with a robe of honour, trimmed with sables. Upon our being ushered, dressed in these robes, into the prince's council-room, the marshal immediately announcing the name of each of us in rotation, said, "My great lord, Leonhard and Sigismund, by thy great favour, strike their foreheads to thee"; i.e., they return thanks for the presents they have received. He added to the robe of honour eighty sables, three hundred ermine, and fifteen hundred squirrel skins. In my first embassy, he gave me in addition, a carriage or sledge, with a beautiful horse, with white bear-skin trappings, and all the necessary appendages. Lastly, he presented me with a great quantity of fish, belugæ, ozetri, and sterled,[1] enclosed in copper vessels, but unsalted, and dismissed me with extreme kindness. I have already described at large, in speaking of the dismissal of the Lithuanian ambassadors, the remainder of the ceremonies adopted by the prince in dismissing ambassadors, as well as in receiving them, when they enter the frontiers of his territory, and how they maintained and treated them until their return to the same point. On this occasion, however, as we had been sent by the Emperor Charles and his brother Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria, for the purpose of bringing about a lasting peace, or at the least a truce, between the Prince of Muscovy and the King of Poland, I have thought right to subjoin an account of the ceremonies adopted by the Prince

  1. ↑ The first is a kind of porpoise, the two others are sturgeon, see pages 13 and 14.
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