A RAMBLE OVER ST. PETERSBURG.
"What a nation of painters Russia must be!" exclaimed I, as we quietly
moved through the silent streets. Every shop had a picture before it,
expressive of the occupation of its owner. Here was a tempting board
covered with representations of every loaf and roll that a painter's
fancy could devise; there a tallow-chandler did his best to make candles
appear picturesque. Even from the second and third floors hung portraits
of fiddles, and flutes, boots, shoes, caps, bonnets, and bears' grease,
and on one board a sad likeness of a rat in a trap made us quicken our
steps as we passed it.
We moved through a deserted market. Here whole lanes are devoted to the
sale of a single kind of article. There is the stocking row, the shoe
row, the hat row, at which it appeared that a whole nation might have
provided covering for head and for feet.
"I wish, dear brother," said Wisky, "that your visit had been in the
season of winter. I could then have led you to a market which strangers
must indeed have surveyed with surprise. You would then have seen
beasts, fishes, and fowls, all frozen so hard that the hatchet is
required to divide them. You would have passed through rows of dead
sheep standing upon their feet, motionless oxen that seemed ready to
low, whole flocks of white hares appearing actually in motion, reindeer
and elks on whose mighty horns the pigeons fearlessly perch!"
"The cold must then be fearful in winter," said I.
"Oh! the houses are kept so warm with stoves that there but little
suffering is known. But woe to the men who loiter in the streets when
they are paved with ice and glistening with snow! The passengers run for
their lives, with the sharp wind rushing after them, as a cat after a
mouse! Men cover even their faces with fur; but should an unlucky nose
peep out from the warm shelter, the bitter frost often bites it on a
sudden. "Father-- father! thy nose!" thus will one stranger salute
another as he passes; and if not speedily rubbed with snow, the nose of
the poor passenger is lost! Men's very eyes are sometimes frozen up, and
they have no resource but to beg admission at the first door to which
they can grope, to unthaw their glued lashes at a stove!"
"All this is very curious," observed I, "but still I have little desire
to witness it. The long winter must be dreary indeed!"
"The Russians are lively fellows," observed Wisky, "and instead of
grumbling at dark skies and piercing blasts, they make merry where
others would murmur. When winter must perforce be their companion, they
oblige the grim old giant to add to their amusements. You should see the
gay sledges as they dash at full speed over the frozen surface of the
River Neva! and the ice-mountains which the people raise, and down which
they glide swift as lightning, laughing, shouting, and singing! I have
seen snow piled up to the very roof of a house; and down its steep
slope, merely seated on a mat, a large merry party glide gaily to the
ground. But," he cried, suddenly interrupting himself, "have a care
where you tread, my brother, or you will be down into that ice-pit!
Never was there such a place as St. Petersburg for these,-- no large
house is deemed complete without one. If Russians _cannot_ be without
abundance of ice in winter, they show that they _will_ not be without it
during their brief hot summer,-- the quantities consumed could scarcely
be believed!"
Whiskerandos, who had been lingering behind us, in a tempting quarter of
the market, now scampered up and joined us. We were passing at the time
a large building, and I could not avoid looking up in wonder at its
strange columns. Of these there were no fewer than a hundred, and the
capital of each was formed by three cannon, with their round open mouths
yawning down into the street.
"This," said our guide, following the direction of my eyes, "is the
Spass Preobrashenskoi Sabor; a church greatly adorned with the spoils of
nations vanquished by Russia."
"Well," said Whiskerandos, who in the course of his adventurous life had
both seen cannon and learnt their use, "perhaps those big instruments of
war are just as well up there, where they are seen, and not heard or
felt. Man is the only creature, I fancy, who, not content with what
powers of destruction nature has given him, cuts down trees from the
forest, digs iron from the mine, sets the furnace glowing, and the
engine working, to fashion means of killing his brothers in a wholesale
manner."
"Yonder," said Wisky, pointing with his nose, "are the father of the
Russian fleet and the grandmother of the houses of St. Petersburg."
"Let's see them by all means!" I exclaimed; "I have viewed plenty of
Russian ships and Russian houses, and I have a lively curiosity to see
the father and the grandmother of so famous a family!"
Wisky rapidly led the way to a hut, into which with little difficulty we
entered, for locks and bars do not keep out rats, nor surly porters
refuse them admission.
"Is this the father of the Russian fleet!" exclaimed Whiskerandos rather
contemptuously, running, audacious rat that he was, along the edge of a
boat about thirty feet long. "Is Russia a child, that she should amuse
herself with a toy, and keep a big boat under a roof where there is no
water to float it, as if it were some delicate jewel!"
"On no jewel in the Emperor's crown," replied Wisky, "would a Russian
look with the same interest as on that poor boat. Peter the Great helped
to fashion it himself! He found his country without a navy, and he gave
her one; he laboured himself as a common ship-wright: and now, as a
mighty oak springs from a single acorn, in that one boat his people view
with reverence "The father of the Russian fleet."
"And where is the grandmother of the houses?" inquired I.
"That is hard by," replied Wisky. "It is nothing but a small wooden
cottage which Peter built for himself by the Neva, before a single
street stretched across the dreary bog upon which he founded this city
of palaces!"
And so we rambled on, light-hearted rats that we were, picking up scraps
here and there, and exchanging observations, till a faint blush in the
eastern sky warned us that it was time to go home. Before we reached the
house already criers were abroad in the streets, screaming, "Boots from
Casan!"-- "Pictures from Moscow!"-- "Flowers, fine flowers!" as they
wandered on, carrying their wares on their heads. Fierce-looking
fellows, with long shaggy hair and beards, wrapped up in skins were
passing about, exchanging good-natured greetings, strangely in contrast
with their appearance. "Good-day, brother! how goes it? what is your
pleasure? how can I serve you?" Smiling, bowing, baring their rough
heads to each other, these poor Russians appeared the very pictures of
politeness shrouded in sheepskin. But remembering that even amongst the
most civilized nations of the world, rats are considered as quite beyond
the pale of courtesy, and that the most good-natured Musjik in this city
would have thought nothing of hitting one of us over with his shoe, we
thought it better to retreat while our skins were whole, and regain our
comfortable quarters in the kitchen.