of perhaps two feet from the granite slabs of
the footpath, or the hexagonal wooden blocks
of the roadway, you see the ominous rotting
of wooden logs and piles on which the whole
city is built, and at a dreadfully short
distance from them you see the WATER—not so
muddy, not so slimy, but the real water of
the Neva. St. Petersburg has been robbed
from the river. Its palaces float, rather than
stand. The Neva, like a haughty courtezan,
bears the splendid sham upon her breast
like a scarlet letter, or the costly gift of a
lover she hates. She revolted in eighteen
hundred and twenty-four, she revolted in
'thirty nine, she revolted in 'forty-two, and
tried to wash the splendid stigma away in
floods of passionate tears. She will cast it
away from her some day, utterly and for
ever. The city is an untenable position now,
like Naples. It must go some day by the
board. Isaac's church and Winter Palace;
Peter the Great's hut and Alexander's monolith
will be no more heard of, and will return
to the Mud, their father, and the Ooze, their
mother.

In the Nevskoï Perspective and the Two
Morskaïas, violent efforts have been made for
years past, in order to procure something like
a decent pavement. There is a broad footway
on either side, composed of large slabs;
but their uncertain foundation causes them
now to settle one way, now on the other, now
to present a series of the most extraordinary
angular undulations. It is as though you
were walking on the sloping roofs of houses,
which had sunk into the boggy soil up to
frieze and architrave; and this delusion is
aggravated by the bornes, or corner-posts set
up to prevent carriages encroaching on the
foot-pavement, which bornes, being little
stumps of wood, just peering from the earth
at every half-dozen yards, or so, look like the
tops of lamp-posts. But the roof-scrambling
effect is most impressive during the
frequent occasions in the summer months,
when the streets of St. Petersburg are
illuminated. Most of the birthdays of the
members of the Imperial family fall between
May and August; and each scion of the
illustrious house of Romanoff has an
illumination to himself, by right of birth. You,
who are yet fresh from the graphic and
glowing description of the coronation
illuminations at Moscow, by the Man who
fought the Battle of England in the Crimea,
better and more bravely than the whole
brilliant staff who have been decorated with
the order of the bath, and who would have
gone there, for head-shaving purposes, long
ago, if people had their due—doubtless,
expect a very splendid account from me of
illuminations at St. Petersburg. But it was
my fortune to see Russia, not in its gala
uniform, with its face washed, and all its
orders on; but Russia in its shirt-sleeves (with
its caftan off, leaving the vexed question of
shirts or no shirts in abeyance, would perhaps
be nearer the mark), Russia at-home,
and not expecting visitors till September—
Russia just recovering its breath, raw,
bruised, exhausted, torn, begrimed from a
long and bloody conflict.

The best illuminations, then, that met my
gaze, were on the birth-night of the Empress
mother, and consisted of an indefinite quantity
of earthen pots, filled with train-oil, or fat,
and furnished with wicks of tow. These
being set alight were placed in rows along the
pavement, one to each little wooden post, or
borne. It was the antediluvian French system
of lampions, in fact, smelling abominably,
smoking suffocatingly, but making a
brave blaze notwithstanding, and, in the
almost interminable perspective of streets and
quays, producing a very curious and ghostly
effect. At midnight you could walk a
hundred yards on the Nevskoï, without finding
a single soul abroad to look at the illuminations;
at midnight it was broad daylight.
The windows were all blind and headless;
what distant droschkies there may have
been, made not the thought of a noise on
the wooden pavement; and these rows of
blinking, flaring grease-pots resting on the
earth, led you to fancy that you were walking
on the roofs of a city of the dead, illuminated
by corpse-candles. Take no lame devil
with you, though, good student, when you
walk these paving-stone house-tops. Bid
him unroof, and what will it avail you?
There are no genial kitchens beneath, no
meat-safes before whose wire-gauze out-works
armies of rats sit down in silent hopeless
siege; no cellars sacred to cats and old wine;
no dust-bins, where ravens have their savings
banks, and invest their little economies
secretly. There is nothing beneath, but the
cold, black ooze of the Neva, which refuses
to divulge its secrets, even to devils—even
to the worsest devil of all, the police. An
eminently secretive river is the Neva. Its
lips are locked with the ice-key for five
months. It tells no tales of the dead men
that find their way into it somehow—even
when the frost is sharpest, and the ice thickest.
Swiftly it carries its ugly secrets—swiftly,
securely, with its remorseless current, to a
friend in whom it can confide, and with
whom it has done business before—the Gulf
of Finland. Only, once a-year, when the ice
breaks up, the Neva is taken in the fact, and
murder will out.

As for the gas-lamps on the Czar's highway,
they puzzle a stranger in Russia terribly.
There is every element of civilisation in
St. Petersburg, from Soyer's Relish to the
magnetic telegraph; and, of course, the
Nevskoï and the Morskaïas have their gas-
lamps. They are handsome erections in
bronze, real or sham, rich in mouldings and
metallic foliage. On the quays, the lamp-
posts assume a different form. They are
great, wooden obelisks, like sentry-boxes
that have grown too tall, and run to seed,