Orloff was appointed, with fine irony, to carry the crown before his former master, whom he had betrayed, and in the necessity for whose first funeral he had played the part of Fate. It was with considerable difficulty that he was hunted up, while Emperor and pageant waited, in the obscure corner where he was sobbing and weeping; and with still greater difficulty was he finally persuaded to perform the task assigned to him in the procession.
Outside the vast monastery, which, like most Russian monasteries, resembles a fortress, though, unlike most of them, it has never served as such, the scene is almost rural. Pigeons, those symbols of the Holy Ghost, inviolable in Russia, attack with impunity the grain bags in the acres of storehouses opposite, pick holes, and eat their fill undisturbed.
From this spot to the slight curve in the Prospekt, at the Znamenskaya Square, a distance of about a mile, where the Moscow railway station is situated, and where the train of steam tram-cars is superseded by less terrifying horse-cars, the whole aspect of the avenue is that of a provincial town, in the character of the people and the buildings, even to the favorite crushed strawberry and azure washes, and green iron roofs on the countrified shops. Here and there, not very far away, a log-house may even be espied.
During the next three quarters of a mile the houses and shops are more city-like, and, being newer than those beyond, are more ornamented as to the stucco of their windows and doors. Here, as elsewhere in this stoneless land, with rare exceptions, the buildings are of brick or rubble, stuccoed and washed, generally in light yellow, with walls three feet or more apart, warmly filled in, and ventilated through the hermetically sealed windows by ample panes in the centre of the sashes, or by apertures in the string-courses between stories, which open into each room. Shops below, apartments above, this is the nearly invariable rule.
It is only when we reach the Anitchkoff Bridge, with its graceful railing of sea-horses, adorned with four colossal bronze groups of horse-tamers, from the hand of the Russian sculptor, Baron Klodt, that the really characteristic part of the Nevsky begins.
It is difficult to believe that fifty years ago this spot was the end of the Petersburg world. But at that epoch the Nevsky was decorated with rows of fine large trees, which have now disappeared to the last twig. The Fontanka River, or canal, over which we stand, offers the best of the many illustrations of the manner in which Peter the Great, with his ardent love of water and Dutch ways, and his worthy successors have turned natural disadvantages into advantages and objects of beauty. The Fontanka was the largest of the numerous marshy rivers in that Arctic bog selected by Peter I. for his new capital, which have been deepened, widened, faced with cut granite walls, and utilized as means of cheap communication between distant parts of the city, and as relief channels for the inundating waves of the Gulf of Finland, which rise, more or less, every year, from August to November, at the behest of the southwest gale. That this last precaution is not superfluous is shown by the iron flood-mark set into the wall of the Anitchkoff Palace, on the southern shore of the Fontanka, as on so many other public buildings in the city, with '1824' appended,-the date of one celebrated and disastrous inundation which attained in some places the height of thirteen feet and seven inches. This particular river derived its name from the fact that it was trained to carry water and feed the fountains in Peter the Great's favorite Summer Garden, of which only one now remains.
At the close of the last century, and even later, persons out of favor at Court, or nobles who had committed misdemeanors, were banished to the southern shores of the Fontanka, as to a foreign land. Among the amusements at the
The stretch which we have traversed on our way from the monastery, and which is punctuated at the corner of the canal and the Prospekt by the pleasing brick and granite palace of the Emperor's brother, Grand Duke Sergiei Alexandrovitch, which formerly belonged to Prince Byeloselsky-Byelozersky, was the suburb belonging to Lieutenant-Colonel Anitchkoff, who built the first bridge, of wood, in 1715. As late as the reign of Alexander I., all persons entering the town were required to inscribe their names in the register kept at the barrier placed at this bridge. Some roguish fellows having conspired to cast ridicule on this custom, by writing absurd names, the guards were instructed to make an example of the next jester whose name should strike them as suspicious. Fate willed that the imperial comptroller, Baltazar Baltazarovitch Kampenhausen, with his Russianized German name, should fall a victim to this order, and he was detained until his fantastic cognomen, so harsh to Slavic ears, could be investigated.
By day or by night, in winter or summer, it is a pure delight to stand on the Anitchkoff Bridge and survey the scene on either hand. If we gaze to the north toward what is one of the oldest parts settled on the rivulet-riddled so-called 'mainland,' in this Northern Venice, we see the long, plain facade of the Katherine Institute for the education of the daughters of officers, originally built by Peter the Great for his daughter Anna, as the 'Italian Palace,' but used only for the palace servants, until it was built over and converted to its present purpose. Beyond, we catch a glimpse of the yellow wings of Count Scheremetieff's ancient house and its great iron railing, behind which, in a spacious courtyard, after the Moscow fashion so rare in thrifty Petersburg, the main building lies invisible to us. If we look to the south, we find the long ochre mass of the Anitchkoff Palace, facing on the Nevsky, upon the right shore; on the left, beyond the palace of Sergiei Alexandrovitch, the branch of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, in old Russian style, with highly colored saints and heads of seraphim on the outer walls; and a perspective of light, stuccoed building,-dwellings, markets, churches,-until the eye halts with pleasure on the distant blue dome of the Troitzky cathedral, studded with golden stars. Indeed, it is difficult to discover a vista in St. Petersburg which does not charm us with a glimpse of one or more of these cross-crowned domes, floating, bubble-like, in the pale azure of the sky. Though they are far from being as beautiful in form or coloring as those of Moscow, they satisfy us at the moment.
If it is on a winter night that we take up our stand here, we may catch a distant glimpse of the numerous 'skating-gardens,' laid out upon the ice cleared on the snowy surface of the canal. The ice-hills will be black with forms flitting swiftly down the shining roads on sledges or skates, illuminated by the electric light; a band will be braying blithely, regardless of the piercing cold, and the skaters will dance on, in their fancy-dress ball or prize races, or otherwise, clad so thinly as to amaze the shivering foreigner as he hugs his furs.
By day the teamsters stand upon the quay, with rough aprons over their ballet-skirted sheepskin coats, waiting for a job. If we hire one of them, we shall find that they all belong to the ancient Russian Artel, or Labor Union, which prevents competition beyond a certain point. When the price has been fixed, after due and inevitable chaffering, one
But the early summer is the season when the Fontanka is to be seen in its most characteristic state. The brilliant blue water sparkles under the hot sun, or adds one more tint to the exquisite hues which make of the sky one vast, gleaming fire-opal on those marvelous 'white nights' when darkness never descends to a depth beyond the point where it leaves all objects with natural forms and colors, and only spiritualizes them with the gentle vagueness of a translucent veil. Small steamers, manned by wooden-faced, blond Finns, connect the unfashionable suburban quarters, lying near the canal's entrance into the Neva on the west, with the fashionable Court quarter on the northern quays at its other entrance into the Neva, seven versts away. They dart about like sea-gulls, picking their path, not unfraught with serious danger, among the obstructions. The obstructions are many: washing-house boats (it is a good old unexploded theory in Petersburg that clothes are clean only when rinsed in running water, even though our eyes and noses inform us, unaided by chart, where the drainage goes); little flotillas of dingy flat- boats, anchored around the 'Fish-Gardens,' and containing the latter's stock in trade, where persons of taste pick their second dinner-course out of the flopping inmates of a temporary scoop-net; huge, unwieldy, wood barks, put together with wooden pegs, and steered with long, clumsy rudders, which the poor peasants have painfully poled- tramp, tramp, tramp, along the sides-through four hundred miles of tortuous waterways from that province of the
