ten-kopek stamp on it
to the post town, twelve versts distant. Foreign postage had been raised
from seven to ten kopeks, and stamps, in a new design, of the latter
denomination (hitherto non-existent) had been in use for about four
months. The country postmaster, who had seen nothing but the old issues,
carefully removed my stamp and sent it back to me, replacing it with a
seven-kopek stamp and a three-kopek stamp. I felt, for a moment, as
though I had been both highly complimented and gently rebuked for my
remarkable skill in counterfeiting!

As a parallel case, I may add that there were plenty of intelligent
people in New York city and elsewhere who were not aware that the United
States still issued three-cent stamps, or who could tell the color of
them, until the Columbian set appeared to attract their attention.

II.

THE NEVSKY PROSPEKT.

The Nevsky Prospekt!

From the time when, as children, we first encounter the words, in
geographical compilations disguised as books of travel, what visions do
they not summon up! Visions of the realm of the Frost King and of his
Regent, the White Tzar, as fantastic as any of those narrated of tropic
climes by Scheherezade, and with which we are far more familiar than we
are with the history of our native land.

When we attain to the reality of our visions, in point of locality at
least, we find a definite starting-point ready to our hand, where
veracious legend and more veracious history are satisfactorily blended.
It is at the eastern extremity of the famous broad avenue,--which is
the meaning of Prospekt. Here, on the bank of the Neva, tradition
alleges that Alexander, Prince of Novgorod, won his great battle--and,
incidentally, his surname of Nevsky and his post of patron saint of
Russia--over the united forces of the Swedes and oppressive Knights of
the Teutonic Order, in the year 1240.

Nearly five hundred years later, the spot was occupied by Rhitiowa, one
of the forty Finnish villages scattered over the present site of St.
Petersburg, as designated by the maps of the Swedes, whom Peter the
Great--practically Russia's second patron saint--expelled anew when
he captured their thriving commercial town, on the shore of the Neva,
directly opposite, now known as Malaya Okhta, possessed of extensive
foreign trade, and of a church older than the capital, which recently
celebrated its two-hundredth anniversary.

It was in 1710 that Peter I. named the place "Victo