Russia (Volume 3) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. LIFE IN THE STREETS. A Stranger accustomed to the crowds and bustle of London or Paris, is struck on his arrival at St. Petersburg by the emptiness of the streets. He finds vast open spaces in which at times he beholds nothing but a solitary droshky, that wends its way along like a boat drifting on the open sea. He sees spacious streets bordered by rows of mute palaces with only here and there a human figure hovering about, like a lurking freebooter among a waste of rocks. The vastness of the plan on which the city has been laid out, shows that its founders speculated on a distant future. Rapidly as the population has been increasing, it is still insufficient to fill the frame allotted to it, or to give to the streets that life and movement which we look for in the capital of a great empire. On the occasion, indeed, of great public festivals and rejoicings, and at all times in the Nevskoi Prospekt and about the Admiralty, the movement is very considerable, but this only tends to leave the throng and bustle of the other quarters of the town far below the average. The population of St. Petersburg is the most varied and motley that mind can imagine. To begin with the military. We have the Caucasian guards, the Tartar guards, the Finland guards, besides a fourth and fifth division of the guards for the various tribes of Cossacks. Of these nations, the lite are thus always retained as hostages in the capital, and their several uniforms are alone sufficient to present a never-changing picture to the eye of an observer. Here may be seen a Cossack trotting over one of the Platz Paradi with his lance in rest, as though in his imagination he were still pursuing a cloud of flying Frenchmen. Further on, perchance a Circassian cavalier, in his shirt of mail, and harnessed...