It is hard to tear ourselves from the charms of the river, with its fishing, ice-cutting, and many other interesting sights always in progress. But of all the scenes, that which we may witness on Epiphany Day-the " Jordan," or Blessing of the Waters, in commemoration of Christ's baptism in the Jordan -is the most curious and typically Russian.

After mass, celebrated by the Metropolitan, in the cathedral of the Winter Palace, whose enormous reddish-ochre mass we perceive rising above the frost- jeweled trees of the Alexander Garden, to our right as we stand at the head of the Nevsky Prospekt, the Emperor, his heir, his brothers, uncles, and other great personages emerge in procession upon the quay. Opposite the Jordan door of the palace a scarlet, gold, and blue pavilion, also called the " Jordan," has been erected over the ice. Thither the procession moves, headed by the Metropolitan and the richly vestured clergy, their mitres gleaming with gems, bearing crosses and church banners, and the imperial choir, clad in crimson and gold, chanting as they go. The Empress and her ladies, clad in full Court costume at midday, look on from the palace windows. After brief prayers in the pavilion, all standing with bared heads, the Metropolitan dips the great gold cross in the rushing waters of the Neva, through a hole prepared in the thick, opalescent, green ice, and the guns on the opposite shore thunder 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 the non-Russian character of the modern ecclesiastical glories of which it is the exponent, as we listen eagerly to the soft, rich, boom-boom-bo-o-om of the great bourdon, embroidered with silver melody by the multitude of smaller bells chiming nearly all day long with a truly orthodox sweetness unknown to the Western world, and which, to-day, are more elaborately beautiful than usual, in honor of the great festival. We appreciate to the full the wailing cry of the prisoner, in the ancient epic songs of the land: "He was cut off from the light of the fair, red sun, from the sound of sweet church-bells."

On the great Palace Square another characteristic sight is to be seen on the nights of Court balls, which follow the Jordan, when the blaze of electric light from the rock-crystal chandeliers, big as haystacks, within the state apartments, is supplemented by the fires in the heater and on the snow outside, round which the waiting coachmen warm themselves, with Rembrandtesque effects of chiaro-oscuro second only to the picturesqueness of dvorniki in their nondescript caps and shaggy coats, who cluster round blazing fagots in less aristocratic quarters when the thermometer descends below zero.

When spring comes with the magical suddenness which characterizes Northern lands, the gardens, quays, and the Nevsky Prospekt still preserve their charms for a space, and are thronged far into the night with promenaders, who gaze at the imperial crowns, stars, monograms, and other devices temporarily applied to the street lanterns, and the fairy flames on the low curb-posts (whereat no horse, though unblinded, ever shies), with which man attempts, on the numerous royal festival days of early summer, to rival the illumination of the indescribably beautiful tints of river and sky. But the peasant-izvostchik goes off to the country to till his little patch of land, aided by the shaggy little farm-horse, which has been consorting on the Prospekt with thoroughbred trotters all winter, and helping him to eke out his cash income, scanty at the best of times; or he emigrates to a summer resort, scorning our insinuation that he is so unfashionable as to remain in town. The deserted Prospekt is torn up for repairs. The merchants, especially the goldsmiths, complain that it would be true economy for them to close their shops. The annual troops of foreign travelers arrive, view the lovely islands of the Neva delta, catch a glimpse of the summer cities in the vicinity, and dream, ah, vain dream! that they have also really beheld the Nevsky Prospekt, the great avenue of the realm of the Frost King and the White Tzar! [2]

III. MY EXPERIENCE WITH THE RUSSIAN CENSOR

In spite of the advantage which I enjoyed in a preliminary knowledge of the Russian language and literature, I was imbued with various false ideas, the origin of which it is not necessary to trace on this occasion. I freed myself from some of them; among others, from my theory as to the working of the censorship in the case of foreign literature. My theory was the one commonly held by Americans, and, as I found to my surprise, by not a few Russians, viz., that books and periodicals which have been wholly or in part condemned by the censor are to be procured only in a mutilated condition, or by surreptitious means, or not at all. That this is not the case I acquired ample proof through my personal experience.

The first thing that an American does on his arrival in St. Petersburg is to scan the foreign newspapers in the hotels eagerly for traces of the censor's blot,-le masque noir, "caviare,"-his idea being that at least one half of the page will be thus veiled from sight. But specimens are not always, or even very often, to be procured with ease. In fact, the demand exceeds the supply sometimes, if I may judge from my own observations and from the pressing applications for these curiosities which I received from disappointed seekers. The finest of these black diamonds may generally be found in the inventive news columns of the London dailies and in the flippant paragraphs of "Punch."