wife, Katherine II., and to accompany her to his proper
resting-place among the sovereigns of Russia, in the cathedral of the
Peter-Paul fortress, Count Alexei Grigorevitch 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situated, and where the train of steam tram-cars is superseded by less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 th