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unexpected cold. I was happy, therefore, to find myself in the train, which was snorting along its iron path en route to the Kremlin. I have little to say about the journey. It occupies about eighteen hours, the distance being four hundred miles. The line is as straight as an arrow, and quite as uninteresting. It passes through a forest as prosaic as a few brooms stuck in a marsh. No tunnel darkens it; no cutting flanks it. Not a town is seen along its course; for though a few are stations, yet the station-house alone is visible. I would have liked to have stopped at Tver, on one of the branches of the Volga, and the starting-point of the steam navigation down that noble river. The route by the railway to Moscow is extremely comfortable; the carriages, as everywhere else, being far superior to those in Britain, especially the second-class. The officials are most civil. The refreshment rooms are equal to any in Europe, and the tea unrivalled. I cannot mention its name without expressing my thankful acknowledgment for this one unmatched Russian luxury. The Russian tea, or Tchai," is the product, I have been told, of provinces in China too far north to be able to supply the European markets through the southern ports of the Empire. It is conveyed overland to Russia, packed in skins, which are seen in the tea-shops, in parcels about a yard square. It is consequently more expensive than our tea, its price varying from 8s. to upwards of 20s. the pound. But a much smaller quantity is required to make a cup, or rather a tumbler, as it is only in such that tea is served in Russia. It is the universal and most refreshing beverage, and costs to the drinker, as far as I remember,

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about 6d. a glass. In some of the "Tractirs" or restaurants of Moscow, such as the famous one near the Exchange, about forty pounds' weight of tea are consumed daily. The food supplied at the principal railway stations had nothing which I could discover very peculiar about it except its general excellence. The Russian dishes, par excellence, must be demanded by the traveller before they can be obtained. In the best restaurants of Moscow, where one sees two friends eating with their spoons out of one tureen, he naturally assumes that this is a national rather than an individual custom; and when dining out, he may probably be startled by his iced soup with cold salmon in it. But along the railway he is not reminded by the cooking of his distance from France or England, except by the high charges for wine above the former, and by the abundance of time granted at every station for meals, as compared with the latter. Next to tea, the common drink is excellent beer, or "piva," and a sour but not unpleasant acid decoction, void of alcohol, called quass. The supplies of fruit are neither cheap nor tempting. Most of it comes from the south. The stoppages on the railway are frequent and long. But a walk and saunter refresh the system, and I saw several really nice-looking young ladies, who were in the same carriage with us, employ these seasons of repose to smoke their cigarettes, which they did with such grace as unfortunately to tempt both strangers and foreigners to follow their bad example.

I found myself early in the forenoon in the busy parlour of Mr Billo, well known to all travellers to Moscow

as a most civil landlord.

we went.

"To the Kremlin!" was the

first and anxious desire of our party. So to the Kremlin How shall I describe it? for it is unquestionably one of the most remarkable, odd, out-of-the-way, like-nothing-else spots I have ever visited, and indeed the thing to be seen in Moscow, if not in Russia. The first sign of the Kremlin, as we walked along the street towards it, was a high whitewashed wall, with Tartar-like embrasures, and separated from the town by an open boulevard. Beyond this nothing was visible; until, on passing through a gateway, behind which was a very small chapel, which seemed from its lamps, its pictures, and crowded worshippers, to be some "holy place," we entered on what seemed a busy town. This was the "Kitai Gorod" or Chinese city. Proceeding along the narrow crowded street, we debouched into a vast oblong space, half a mile or so in length, and about half this or less in breadth. This was the krasnoi ploschad, (red place.) The one side was bounded, opposite to us, and also to the right, by another high whitewashed wall, with towers, which contained the Kremlin proper; the other side by the back of the low houses of the great bazaar. The end to the left was occupied by that most fantastical and indescribable of all buildings, that compound of twenty domes of different shapes and sizes, of stairs, and chapels, and mass of colour, blue, green, yellow, white, red, and gilt; that Tartar-like Chinese Pagoda, ridiculous were it not so venerated and venerable-the Cathedral of St Basil or Basiliki Blagennoi. Nearly opposite this church is the sacred entrance to the Kremlin,

by the Holy Gate or the "Spass vorota." Over it there hangs, under a glass, and before a lamp which burns from age to age, a picture of the Saviour. From various traditions, which need not here be enumerated, every passenger, high and low, from the Emperor to the serf, must keep off his hat as he passes through this covered archway, which leads upwards, by a slight ascent of a few yards, to the acropolis and capital of Moscow. So have passed many a stately procession, many a weary pilgrim, many a conqueror and soldier from conquests extending from Paris to Persia, and from the Volga to the Amoor. Bareheaded, I found myself at last on the stone plateau of the old Kremlin. Anxious to get a bird's-eye view of the whole before examining any of its details, I directed my steps at once to the highest point in the city, the summit of the high tower of "Ivan Valiki," or Long John. But I could not help pausing as I recalled an early dream which, along with many others, was suggested by a dear old book I have long since lost sight of, called Ten Wonders of the World, a dream now realised in the "Great Bell of Moscow." There it lay, the "Tzar Kolckoi," or King of Bells, a huge inverted cup, twenty-one feet high, and upwards of sixty feet in circumference, whose very metal is worth £350,000, and with a piece out of its side which leaves a door open for easy access to the curious who wish to visit its ample interior. What a tongueless mouth! What a dead thunderer! But we must ascend the tower. We first pass a huge bell, which in size looks like the eldest son or wife of the dead one below, weighing about

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