's impressions become sadly
tumbled together and very soon lose their most salient failures. To be
whirled about the world by land and sea, as I have been for the last
year, is enough to turn one's brain into a curiosity shop. When I
undertake to pick out of the pile of rubbish some picture that must
have been originally worth a great deal of money, I find it so
disfigured by the sheer force of friction that it looks no better than
an old daub. The pity of it is, too, that the very best of my
gatherings are apt to get lost or ruined; and sometimes it happens
that when I varnish up what appears to be valuable it turns out not a
groat. Want of method would ruin a Zingalee gipsy or a Bedouin Arab.
No doubt you have already discovered to your sorrow that when we start
on a visit to the Kremlin, it is no sure indication that we will not
spend the day in the Riadi or the old-clothes market. If either you or
I ever reach our destination, it will be by the sheerest accident. And
yet one might as well undertake to see Rome without the Capitoline
Hill, or Athena without the Acropolis, as Moscow without the Kremlin.
We have had several glimpses of it, to be sure, in the course of our
rambles, but you must admit that they were very vague and
indefinite--especially the last, when, if you remember, we were
laboring under some strange mental hallucination.

The Kremlin has been fully described by many learned and accomplished
travelers. Coxe, Atkinson, Kohl, and various others, have given
elaborate accounts of it; yet why despair of presenting, in a homely
way, some general idea of it, such as one might gather in the course
of an afternoon's ramble? After reading all we find about it in books
of travel, our conceptions are still vague and unsatisfactory.
Probably the reason is, that minute details of history and
architecture afford one but a very faint and inadequate idea of the
appearance of any place. Like the pictures of old Dennen, they may
give you every wrinkle with the accuracy of a daguerreotype, but they
fail in the general effect, or resemble the corpse of the subject
rather than the living reality. I must confess that all I had read on
Russia previous to my visit afforded me a much less vivid idea of the
actual appearance of the country, the people, or the principal cities,
than the rough crayon sketches of Timm and Mitreuter, which I had seen
in the shop windows of Paris. This may not be the fault of the
writers, who, of