with music, songs and dances beguiled the days
until, with the returning spring, the river opened. In the meantime an
immense flotilla of imperial barges had been prepared to drift down the
stream, a thousand miles, to its mouth at Kherson, where the river flows
into the Black sea. These barges were of magnificent dimensions,
floating palaces, containing gorgeous saloons and spacious sleeping
apartments. As they were constructed merely to float upon the rapid
current of the stream, impelled by sails when the breeze should favor,
they could easily be provided with all the appliances of luxury. It is
difficult to conceive of a jaunt which would present more of the
attractions of pleasure, than thus to glide in saloons of elegance, with
imperial resources and surrounded by youth, beauty, genius and rank, for
a thousand miles down the current of one of the wildest and most
romantic streams of Europe.

It was a beautiful sunny morning of May, when the regal party,
accompanied by the music of military bands, and with floating banners,
entered the barges. The river, broad and deep, rolls on with majestic
flow, now through dense forests, black and gloomy, where the barking of
the bear is heard and wolves hold their nightly carousals; now it winds
through vast prairies hundreds of miles in extent; again it bursts
through mountain barriers where cliffs and crags rise sublimely
thousands of feet in the air; here with precipitous sides of granite,
bleak and scathed by the storms of centuries, and there with gloomy firs
and pines rising to the clouds, where eagles soar and scream and rear
their young. Flocks and herds now graze upon the banks; here lies the
scattered village, and its whole population, half civilized men, and
matrons and maidens in antique, grotesque attire, crowd the shores. Now
the pinnacles and the battlements of a great city rise to view. Armies
were gathered at several points to entertain the imperial pleasure-party
with all the pomp and pageantry of war. At Pultowa they witnessed the
maneuverings of a battle, with its thunderings and uproar and apparent
carnage--the exact representation of the celebrated battle of Pultowa,
which Peter the Great gained on the spot over Charles XII. of Sweden.

The Emperor Joseph had been invited to join this party, and, with his
court and retinue, was to meet them at Kherson, near the mouth of the
Dneister, and accompany the empress to the Crimea. But, perhaps
attracted by the