The answer
invariably is, "Who knows? A forty of forties," which is the old
equivalent, in the Epic Songs, of incalculable numbers. After a while
one really begins to feel that sixteen hundred is not an exaggerated
estimate.

Very few of the streets in any part of the town are broad; all of them
seem like lanes to a Petersburger, and "they are forever going up and
down," as a Petersburg cabman described the Moscow hills to me, in
serious disapproval. He had found the ground too excitingly uneven and
the inhabitants too evenly dull to live with for more than a fortnight,
he confessed to me. Many of the old mansions in the centre of the town
have been converted into shops, offices, and lodgings; and huge, modern
business buildings have taken the places formerly occupied, I presume,
by the picturesque "hovels" of the travelers' tales.

One of the most interesting places in the White Town to me was the huge
foundling asylum, established by Katherine II., immediately after her
accession to the throne. There are other institutions connected with it,
such as a school for orphan girls. But the hospital for the babies is
the centre of interest. There are about six hundred nurses always on
hand. Very few of them have more than one nursling to care for, and a
number of babies who enter life below par, so to speak, are accommodated
with incubators. The nurses stand in battalions in the various large
halls, all clad alike, with the exception of the woolen _kokoshnik_,--
the coronet-shaped headdress with its cap for the hair,--which is of a
different color in each room. It requires cords of "cartwheels"--the
big round loaves of black bread--to feed this army of nurses. If they
are not fed on their ordinary peasant food, cabbage soup and sour black
bread, they fall ill and the babies suffer, as no bottles are used.

The fact that the babies are washed every day was impressed on my mind
by the behavior of the little creatures while undergoing the operation.
They protested a little in gentle squeaks when the water touched them,
but quieted down instantly when they were wiped. It is my belief that
Russian children never cry except during their bath. I heard no
infantile wailing except in this asylum, and very little there. Many
Russian mothers of all ranks still tie up their babies tightly in
swaddling clothes, on the old-fashioned theory that it makes their limbs
straight. But these foundlings are not swaddled. After its bath, the
ba