Chapter 17

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.