. In the
Imperial palace is such a slide, built of mahogany.

Street-life in St. Petersburgh presents many aspects strange to one who
comes fresh from the capitals of other countries. One of the first things
which will strike him is the silence and desertion of most of the streets.
The thronging, eager crowd of other cities is here unknown. There is room
enough, and to spare here. Broad streets, lined with rows of palaces, are
as silent and lonely as deserted Tadmor, and a solitary _droshka_ breaking
the uniformity of the loneliness, heightens the effect. Leaving these
broad, still streets, and mingling in the throng that presses in and
through the Admiralty Place, the Nevskoi Perspective, or the Place of St.
Isaac, the most noticeable feature, at first glance, is the preponderance
of the military. The ordinary garrison of the capital amounts to 60,000
men. The Russian army comprises an almost infinite variety of uniforms,
and specimens of these, worn by the _elite_ of every corps, are constantly
in the capital.

There are the Tartar guards, and the Circassian guards, Cossacks from the
Don, from the Ural, and from Crimea; guards with names ending with "_off_"
and "_ski_," unpronounceable by Western lips. The wild Circassian--enacting
the double part of soldier and hostage--silver-harnessed and mail-coated,
alternates with the skin-clad Cossack of the Ural, darting, lance in rest,
over the parade-ground. There are regiments uniform not only in size of
the men, color of the horses, and identity of equipments, but in the
minutiae of personal appearance. Of one, all the men are pug-nosed,
blue-eyed, and red bearded; of another, every man has a nose like a hawk,
with eyes, hair and beard as black as a raven's wing. Half the male
population of St. Petersburg wear uniform; for, besides these 60,000
soldiers, it is worn by officers of every grade, by the police, and even
by professors of the university, and by teachers and pupils in the public
schools.

Turning from the military to the civil portion of the population, the same
brilliant variety of costumes every where meets the eye. The sober-suited
native of western and civilized Europe, jostles the brilliant silken robes
of the Persian or Bokharian; the Chinaman flaunts his dangling pig-tail,
ingeniously pieced out by artificial means, in the face of the
smoothly-shorn Englishman; the white-toothed Arab meets the
tobacco-stained German; Yankee sailors and adventurers, portl