nder out a salute. The pontoon Palace Bridge, the
quays on both sides of the river, all the streets and squares for a long
distance round about, are densely thronged; and, as the guns announce
the consecration, every head is bared, every right hand in the mass,
thousands strong, is raised to execute repeated signs of the cross on
brow and breast.

From our post at the head of the Prospekt we behold not the ceremony
itself but the framework of a great national picture, the great Palace
Square, whereon twenty thousand troops can manoeuvre, and in whose
centre rises the greatest monolith of modern times, the shaft of red
Finland granite, eighty-four feet in height, crowned with a
cross-bearing angel, the monument to Alexander I. There stand the
Guards' Corps, and the huge building of the General Staff, containing
the Ministries of Finance and of Foreign Affairs, and many things
besides, originally erected by Katherine II. to mask the rears of the
houses at the end of the Nevsky, and rebuilt under Nicholas I., sweeping
in a magnificent semicircle opposite the Winter Palace. Regiments
restrain the zeal of the crowd to obtain the few posts of vantage from
which the consecration of the waters is visible, and keep open a lane
for the carriages of royalty, diplomats, and invited guests. They form
part of the pageant, like the Empress's cream-colored carriage and the
white horses and scarlet liveries of the Metropolitan. The crowd is
devout and silent, as Russian crowds always are, except when they see
the Emperor after he has escaped a danger, when they become vociferous
with an animation which is far more significant than it is in more noisy
lands. The ceremony over, the throngs melt away rapidly and silently;
pedestrians, Finnish ice-sledges, traffic in general, resume their
rights on the palace sidewalks and the square, and after a state
breakfast the Emperor drives quietly home, unguarded, to his Anitchkoff
Palace.

If we glance to our left, and slightly to our rear, as we stand thus
facing the Neva and the Admiralty, we see the Prefecture and the
Ministry of War, the latter once the mansion of a grandee in the last
century; and, rising above the latter, we catch a glimpse of the upper
gallery, and great gold-plated, un-Russian dome, of St. Isaac's
Cathedral, which is visible for twenty miles down the Gulf of Finland.
The granite pillars glow in the frosty air with the bloom of a Delaware
grape. We forgive St. Isaac for th