, 1881-11-25
81. Petersburg In summer.

A traveller should always make it q
point, when he finds it possible, says a
correspondent of the London Times, to
visit a country when it is III what is called
Its own element. Russia is the land of
snow and ice, and may probably be seen
TO advantage in skating and sledge-
driving weather. All provisions are
here made against the discomforts of u
hard winter. But against the scourge of
the summer dust, which sweeps day and
night over st. Petersburg, all the pumps
drawing water from all the four branches
of the Neva are inefficient. There IS
nothing for it but to turn ones back
upon 1t; and that is what every man does
who can manage it. The city is left to q
few priests, the police, officers of her
Britannia Majesty's squadron, who are
on weeks holiday, and to myself; and
the Hotel de Europe, the best in the
town, is being swept, scraped and paint
ed like London club III midsummer
tor this is the dead season in st. Peters
burg, and this place is really too much
OF I thing for man to have 1t ali to him
self.
What town it is! How large, how
dismally empty? How 1t squats like an
immense alligator half in and half out of
swamp, modelled on Amsterdam, and
reminding one of Venice What miles
and miles OF prospects, or, as the
French would say "boulevards;" what
endless succession of wide, open spaces
aud magnificent distances, of long,
straight lines OF walls and rows of trees,
and lnternlnable avenues contrived, as
1t were, to allow the town ample room to
run ont VI town. \ city OF churches.
converts and palaces, OF steeples and
monuments, OF gold, bronze, granite and
marble, Of buildings IN all sty les
Europe and ASIatlc, quaint, original or
indifferent copies, many OF them grand
and massive, yet streWn over space at
haphaZard, on ii perfectly fiat surface,
grouping nowhere; nowhere laid out for
effect or with AN eye TO the picturesque.
Town OF princes, to ali appearance, or
of wealthy bankers or traders, with
nothing mean, no back slumS, no Rag
fair; the home OF the poor II at all exist
ing, carefully hidden out of sight; the
Whole covering scores OF miles of ground
a maze of isles and islets, of bridges and
embankments, of river and branches of
river, and canal
1t Is questionable, indeed, whether
Peter the Great ever meant st. Peters
burg for a permanent court residence
and capital. AS late rs 1924, seven
months before his death, it was not here,
but at Moscow, he celebrated the coro-
nation of his wife, Catherine, and if he
spent much of his time on this spot, it
was chiefly because Il work of such mag
Eitude as he had undertaken required
the masters incessant presence For
the rest, all that Peter wanted here was
port, and could under the circum-
stances, find no better. He built it on
conquered ground out of all the boun-
daries of Old Russia, amid u Finnish
population, formerly the subjects of
Sweden.
He drafted his workmen among the
serfs of all his provinces, and wasted
100, 900 lives in the achievement, labor
being as cheap for him "a it ever was
for the kingly builders of the Egyptian
pyramids. The site was q swamp-an
unsafe and unhealthy swamp-the mono
lith column of Alexander / and the Isaac
Church-show in their deep crevices the
rapid decay to which the treaeherous
ground underneath is booming them
SO unsafe, besides, AS to be subject to
inundutions, like the sound of ancient
Rome; for the city has already been de-
structively flooded eight times since 1903
the date of its foundation.