(it is
a good old unexploded theory in Petersburg that clothes are clean only
when rinsed in running water, even though our eyes and noses inform us,
unaided by chart, where the drainage goes); little flotillas of dingy
flat-boats, anchored around the "Fish-Gardens," and containing the
latter's stock in trade, where persons of taste pick their second
dinner-course out of the flopping inmates of a temporary scoop-net;
huge, unwieldy, wood barks, put together with wooden pegs, and steered
with long, clumsy rudders, which the poor peasants have painfully poled
--tramp, tramp, tramp, along the sides--through four hundred miles of
tortuous waterways from that province of the former haughty republic,
"Lord Novgorod the Great," where Prince Rurik ruled and laid the
foundations of the present imperial empire, and whence came Prince-Saint
Alexander, to win his surname of Nevsky, as we have seen, at the spot
where his monastery stands, a couple of miles, at most, away.

The boatmen, who have trundled all day long their quaint little barrows
over the narrow iron rails into the spacious inner courtyards of the
houses on the quay, and have piled up their wood for winter fuel, or
loaded it into the carts for less accessible buildings, now sit on the
stern of their barks, over their coarse food,--sour black bread,
boiled buckwheat groats, and salted cucumbers,--doffing their hats and
crossing themselves reverently before and after their simple meal, and
chatting until the red glow of sunset in the north flickers up to the
zenith in waves of sea-green, lilac, and amber, and descends again in
the north, at the pearl pink of dawn. Sleep is a lost art with these
men, as with all classes of people, during those nerve-destroying "white
nights." When all the silvery satin of the birch logs has been removed
from their capacious holds, these primitive barks will be unpegged, and
the cheap "bark-wood," riddled with holes as by a _mitrailleuse_, will
be used for poor structures on the outskirts of the town.

On the upper shore of this river, second only to the Neva in its
perennial fascination, and facing on the Prospekt, stands the Anitchkoff
Palace, on the site of a former lumber-yard, which was purchased by the
Empress Elizabeth, when she commissioned her favorite architect,
Rastrelli, to erect for Count Razumovsky a palace in that rococo style
which he used in so many palaces and churches during her reign and that
of Katherine II.,--the ro