in
two rows along the principal alley to be chosen by their future spouse.
However, it was as yet too early for this exhibition, and there was nobody
here except police-officers, the very sight of whom makes me sick; so off
I set, and was caught near the Newski Prospekt in a tremendous
thunder-storm, which forced me to take shelter, first under the arch of a
_porte-cochere_, and secondly in the Casan Church, in which I discovered
for the first time the baton of Marshal Davoust, stuck up in a glass-case
against one of the piers supporting the dome of the Church. Underneath the
baton, upon a gilded metal-plate, are two inscriptions, the one in Russ,
the other in Latin, which state that the baton is that of Marshal Davoust,
taken near Crasnoe, 5th Nov. 1812; so there can be no doubt of the fact."

"I was a good deal amused with a bad painting over the simple unassuming
tomb of the immortal Kutusoff, representing the Kremlin, the church of
Ivan Blagennoi, and a procession of priests marching out of the former by
the Holy Gate towards the latter. Kutusoff's tomb is shaded by banners
taken from the Poles, the Prussians, and the French, having at the ends of
their staffs, the eagles of the two former, and the horse of the latter."

* * * * *

LE JARDIN DES PLANTES.

Mrs. Watts's charming Juvenile Annual, the _New Year's Gift_, furnishes
the following admirable model of a descriptive letter from the French
capital.

"The day following the one on which we were at Versailles, we spent in
visiting the Garden of Plants; this institution (if I may so call it) is a
little on the same plan as our Zoological Garden, and is said to be quite
unrivalled in the whole world. It contains curiosities of every age, and
from every quarter of the globe. The gardens, which cover more than a
hundred acres of ground, are filled with every plant that can be reared in
France, either naturally or by artificial means, from the lordly palm to
the humble potato.

"One enclosure is filled with every specimen of shrub that is capable of
being made to form a fence, from the prickly holly, of forty feet high, to
the dwarf-box, scarcely an inch above the ground.

"In another place, we see specimens of all the various modes of training
fruit, and other kinds of trees, which the ingenuity of man has been able
to accomplish--this is peculiarly interesting. Here, a tree is trained to
resemble a large basin, another is ma