ther building. Thus it still
remains, a place of pilgrimage for devout Russians. It contains many
relics of the great czar. His bedroom is now a chapel.

Such a city, in such a situation, should have taken years to build.
Peter wished to have it done in months, and he pushed the labor with
little regard for its cost in life and treasure. Men were brought from
all sections of Russia and put to work. Disease broke out among them,
engendered by the dampness of the soil; but the work went on. Floods
came and covered the island, drowning some of the sick in their beds;
but there was no alleviation. History tells us that Swedish prisoners
were employed, and that they died by thousands. Death, in Peter's eyes,
was only an unpleasant incident, and new workmen were brought in
multitudes, many of them to perish in their turn. It has been said that
the building of the city cost two hundred thousand lives. This is, no
doubt, an exaggeration, but it indicates a frightful mortality. But the
feverish impatience of the czar told in results, and by 1714 the city
possessed over thirty-four thousand buildings, with inhabitants in
proportion.

The floods came and played their part in the work of death. In that of
1706, Peter measured water twenty-one inches deep on the floor of his
hut. He thought it "extremely amusing" as men, women, and children were
swept past his windows on floating wreckage down the stream. What the
people themselves thought of it history does not say.

[Illustration: SLEIGHING IN RUSSIA.]

As yet Peter had no design of making St. Petersburg the capital of his
empire. That conception seems not to have come to him until after the
crushing defeat of the Swedish monarch Charles XII. at the battle of
Pultowa. And indeed it was not until 1817 that it was made the capital.
It was the fifth Russian capital, its predecessors in that honor having
been Novgorod, Kief, Vladimir, and Moscow.

To add a commercial quarter to the new city, Peter chose the island of
Vasily Ostrof,--the Finnish "Island of Buffaloes,"--where a town was
laid out in the Dutch fashion, with canals for streets. This island is
still the business centre of the city, though the canals have long since
disappeared. The streets of St. Petersburg for many years continued
unpaved, notwithstanding the marshy character of the soil, and in the
early days boats replaced carriages for travel and traffic.

The work of building the new capital was not confined to t