Botkin (what a name!), your Russian translator, has called. He is quite a different type from Tourgueneff, though a tall man, this one too. I should say he must be a Cossack – not that I ever saw a Cossack or heard one described, instinct is all I have for it. He has flattened high–boned cheeks – a nose flattened towards the point – small, very black, deep–set eyes, with thin semi–circular eyebrows – a wide thin mouth – a complexion whity–grey, and the skin of his face looked thick enough to make a saddle of! He does not possess himself like Tourgueneff, but bends and gesticulates like a Frenchman.

He burst into the room with wild expressions of his ‘admiration for Mr Carlyle’. I begged him to be seated, and he declared ‘Mr Carlyle was the man for Russia’. I tried again and again to ‘enchain’ a rational conversation, but nothing could I get out of him but rhapsodies about you in the frightfullest English that I ever heard out of a human head! It is to be hoped that (as he told me) he reads English much better than he speaks it, else he must have produced an inconceivable translation of ‘Hero–Worship’…… He was all in a perspiration when he went away, and so was I!