when he goes home. It may be that for reasons of their own the Russian police help to encourage him in this belief, but that they spy upon every stranger who comes to see their show cities seems hardly probable. And if the stranger thinks he is being watched he will behave himself just as well as though he were being watched, and the result, so far as the police are concerned, is the same.

All the places in the fast trains had been engaged for many days before, so that we were forced into a very slow one, and as the line was being constantly cleared to make way for the cars of imperial blue that bore princes and archdukes and special ambassadors, we were three days and three nights on our way to Moscow. But it was an interesting journey in spite of its interminable length, and in spite of the monotonous landscape through which we crawled; and later, in looking back to it and comparing its lazy progress with the roar and rush and the suffocating crowds of the coronation weeks, it seemed a most peaceful and restful experi

ence.

The land on either side of the track was as level as our Western prairie, but broken here and there with woods of trembling birch and dark fir trees. Scattered villages lay at great distances from one another, and almost even with the soil, their huts of logs and mud seldom standing higher than one story, and with doors so low that a tall man could enter them only by stooping.

Between these log houses were roads which the snow and rain had changed into rivers of mud, and which seemed to lead to nowhere, but to disappear from off the face of the earth as soon as they had reached the last of each group of huts. There were no stores nor taverns nor town halls visible from the car windows, such as one sees on our Western prairie. Instead there were always the same lowroofed huts of logs painted brown, the church of two stories in the centre, the wide muddy road straggling down to the station, the fields where men and women ploughed the rich chocolate-colored soil, and, overhead, countless flocks of crows that swept like black clouds across the sky. When the villages ceased the marshes began, and from them tall heron and bittern rose and sailed heavily away, answering the shrill whistle of the locomotive with their hoarse, melancholy cries.

There are probably no two kinds of bird so depressing in every way as are the heron and the crow, and they seemed to typify the whole country between Alexandrov and Moscow, where, in spite of the sun that shone brilliantly and the bright moist green of the grass, there was no sign of movement or mirth or pleasure, but, instead, a hopeless, dreary silence, and the marks of an unceasing struggle for the bare right to exist.

The railroad stations were the only bright spots on our horizon. They stood in bunches of aspen and birch trees, surrounded by neat white palings, and inside there were steaming samovars brilliantly burnished, and countless kinds of hors d'oeuvres in little dishes on clean linen cloths, and innumerable bottles of vodki, and caviare fresh from the river, in large tin buckets. As we never knew when we should arrive at the next station, we ate something at each one, in order that we might be sure of that much at least, and, in consequence, my chief recollection of travelling in Russia is hot tea, which we scalded ourselves in drinking, and cold caviare, and waiters in high boots, who answered our inquiries as to how long the train stopped by exclaiming, "Beefsteak," and dashing off delightedly to bring it.

In Russia they

At every cross-road there were little semi-official stations, with the fences and gates around them painted with the black and white stripes of the government, the whole in charge of a woman, who stood in the road with a green flag held out straight in front of her. feed the locomotive engines with wood as well as coal, and long before we reached a station we would know that we were approaching it by the piles of kindling heaped up on either side of the tracks for over a mile, so that the country had the appearance of one vast lumber-yard.

These piles of wood, and the black and white striped fences, and the frequent spectacle of a lonely child guarding one poor cow or a half-starved horse, with no other sign of life within miles of them, were the three things which seemed to us to be the most conspicuous and characteristic features of the eight hundred miles that stretch from the German border to the ancient capital.

All that we saw of the moujiks was at the stations, where they were gathered in silent, apathetic groups to watch the train

none of them either in face or figure showed any marked trace of feminine grace or beauty.

Beyond Poland the Hebrew type, there prevalent, disappeared, of course, and the population seemed to be divided into two classes-those that wore a uniform and those that wore the sheepskin coat. But the greater number wore the uniform. There were so many of these, and they crowded each other so closely, that all the men of the nation seemed to spend their time in saluting somebody, and to enjoy doing it so much that when no one passed for some time whom they could reasonably salute, they saluted some one of equal rank to themselves. It seemed to be the national attitude.

"In this country," a man told us, "it is well to remember that every one is either master or slave. And he is likely to take whichever position you first assign to him." Stated baldly, that sounds absurd, but in practice we found that it held good to a certain degree. If the stranger approach es the Russian official-and everybody is some sort of an official-politely and hat in hand, the Russian at once assumes an air of authority over him; but if he takes the initiative, and treats the official as a public servant, he accepts that position, and serves him so far as his authority extends.

Moscow proved to be a city of enormous extent, spread out widely over many low hills, with houses of two stories and streets of huge round cobblestones. The houses are of stucco, topped with tin roofs painted green, and the bare public squares and lack of municipal buildings and of statues in public places give Moscow the undecorated, uncared-for, look of Constantinople, or of any other half-barbaric capital where the city seems not to have been built with design, but to have grown up of itself and to have spread as it pleased.

The Kremlin, of which so much was written at the time of the coronation, is no part of the city proper. It is in it, but not of it. It is a thing alone, unlike the rest of Moscow; nor, indeed, is it like any other city in the world. Its great jagged walls encompass churches, arsenals, palaces, and convents of an architecture bor rowed from India and Asia and the Europe of the Middle Ages; it is as though the Tower of London, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's,

and the Knightsbridge Barracks were all huddled together on the Thames Embankment and shut in with monster walls, leaving the rest of London an unpicturesque waste of shops of stucco, and of churches with gilded domes instead of spires, separated by narrow and roughly hewn highways. If a high wall were built around the lower part of New York city, and across it at Rector Street, forming a triangle to the Battery, the extent of the ground it would cover would about equal that shut in by the ramparts of the Kremlin.

At the time of the coronation the arteries of the great sprawling city that lies about this fortress were choked with hundreds of thousands of strange people. These people were never at rest; they apparently never slept nor relaxed, but turned night into day and day into night, and formed a seething, bubbling mixture of human beings, the like of which perhaps never before has been brought together in one place.

There were hundreds of thousands of Russian peasants who slept in the streets; there were tens of thousands of Russian soldiers who slept under canvas in the surrounding plains; there were princes in gold and plate-glass carriages of state; Russian generals seated behind black horses, driven three abreast, that never went at a slower pace than a gallop, so that the common people fell over one another to get out of danger; there were ambassadors and governors of provinces, and all their wonderfully costumed suites; bare-kneed Highlanders and barekneed Servians; Mongolians in wrappers of fur and green brocade, with monster muffs for hats; proud little Japanese soldiers in smart French uniforms; Germans with spiked helmets; English diplomats in top hats and frock-coats, as though they were in Piccadilly; Italian officers with five-pointed stars on their collars and green cocks' feathers in their patentleather sombreros; Hungarian nobles in fur-trimmed satins; maharajahs from the Punjab and southern India in tall turbans of silk; and masters of ceremonies and dignitaries of the Russian court in golden uniforms and with ostrich feathers in their cocked hats. And all of these millions of people were crowding each other, pushing and hurrying and worrying, each breathing more than his share of air and taking up more than his share of

earth, and each of them feverish, excited, overworked, and underfed, and thinking only of himself and of his own dutieswhether his duty was to leave cards at some prince's door, or to risk his life in hanging a row of lamps to a minaret in the skies; whether it was to meet an arriving archduke at the railroad station, or to beg his ambassador for places for himself and his wife on a grand stand.

Imagine a city with its every street as densely crowded as was the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago Fair, and with as different races of people, and then add to that a Presidential convention, with its brass bands, banners, and delegates, and

send into that at a gallop not one Princess Eulalie who succeeded in upsetting the entire United States during the short time she was in it--but several hundred Princesses Eulalie and crown-princesses and kings and governors and aides-decamp, all of whom together fail to make any impression whatsoever on the city of Moscow, and then march seventy thousand soldiers, fully armed, into that mob, and light it with a million colored lamps, and place it under strict martial law, and you have an idea of what Moscow was like at the time of the coronation.

There were probably some one or two of that great crush who enjoyed the coro

nation ceremonies, but they enjoyed them best, as every one else does now, in perspective; at the time there was too much to do and too little time in which to do it -even though the sun did rise at midnight in order to give us a few more hours of day-for any one to breathe regularly or to feel at peace.

The moujik who repaired the streets may possibly, in his ignorance, have envied the visiting prince as he dashed over the stones which the moujik had just laid down with his bare hands; but the prince had probably been standing several hours in a padded uniform, with nothing to eat and nothing to smoke, and was going back to his embassy to jump into another padded uniform and to stand for a few hours longer, until, as he drove back again, and saw the moujik stretched for the night on his pile of cobble-stones, he probably envied him and said, “Look at that lazy dog sleeping peacefully, while I must put on my fourth uniform to-day, and stand up in tight boots at a presentation of felicitations and at a court ball at which no one is allowed to dance." In those days you could call no man happy unless you knew the price he paid for his happi

ness.

A large number of the people in Moscow at that time might have been divided into two classes: those who were there officially, and who had every minute of their stay written out for them, and who longed for a moment's rest; and those who were there unofficially, and who worried themselves and every one over them in trying to see the same functions and ceremonies from which the officials were as sincerely anxious to be excused. As a rule, when the visitor first arrived in Moscow he found enough of interest in the place itself to content him, and did not concern himself immediately with the ceremonies or court balls; he considered, rightly enough, that the decorations in the streets and the congress of strange people from all parts of the world which he saw about him formed a spectacle which in itself repaid him for his journey. He found the city hung with thousands of flags and banners; with Venetian masts planted at the street corners and in the open squares; with rows of flags on ropes, hiding the sky as completely as do the clothes that swing on lines from the back windows of New York ten ements. The streets were tunnels of col

ored bunting by day and valleys of colored lights by night; false façades of electric bulbs had been built before the palaces, theatres, and the more important houses, and colored glass bowls in the forms of gigantic stars and crowns and crosses, or in letters that spelled the names of the young Czar and Czarina, were reared high in the air, so that they burned against the darkness like pieces of stationary fireworks.

There were miles and miles of these necklaces of lamps, and people in strange costumes and uniforms moved between them, with their faces now illuminated, as though by the sun's rays, by great wheels of revolving electric-light bulbs, and now dyed red or blue or green, as though they were figures in a ballet on the stage.

But the visitor who was quite satisfied with this free out-of-door illumination at night, or with wandering around, Baedeker in hand, by day, soon learned that there were other sights to see behind doors which were not free, and access to which could not be bought with roubles, and he at once joined the vast army of the discontented. Sometimes he wanted one thing, and again another; it might be that he aspired only to a seat on a tribune from which to watch the parade pass, or it might be that he longed for an invitation to a ball at the French Embassy; but, whatever it was, he made life a torment to himself and to his official representative until he obtained it. The story of the struggles of the visitors to the coronation to be present at this or that ceremony would fill many pages in itself; and it might, if truthfully set down, make humorous reading now. But it was a desperate business then, and heartburnings and envy and all uncharitableness ruled when Mrs. A. was invited to a state dinner and Mrs. B. was not, or when an aide-de-camp obtained a higher place on the tribune than did any of his brother officers.

There was what was called a court list, or the distinguished strangers' list, and that was the root of all the evil; for when the visitor succeeded in getting his name on that list his struggles were at an end, and he saw at least half of all there was to see, and received large engraved cards from the Emperor, and his soul was at peace.

And it may be considered a tribute to