You will want to know how I come to be here.  I also have already asked myself this question, and the answer I received was that change is the soul of life.  The truth of this profound saying becomes especially obvious after having lived for ten weeks in a sunny room of a hotel, with the look-out on pavements.  The charms of moving become rather blunted if they occur repeatedly within a short period; I therefore determined to forego them, handed over all paper to——­, gave Engel my keys, declared that I would put up in a week at Stenbock’s house, and drove to the Moscow station.  This was yesterday at noon, and this morning, at eight o’clock, I alighted here at the Hotel de France.  First of all I shall pay a visit to a charming acquaintance of former times, who lives in the country, about twenty versts from here; to-morrow evening I shall be here again; Wednesday and Thursday shall visit the Kremlin and so forth; and Friday or Saturday sleep in the beds which Engel will meantime buy.  Slow harnessing and fast driving lie in the character of this people.  I ordered the carriage two hours ago:  to every call which I have been uttering for each successive ten minutes of an hour and a half, the answer is, “Immediately,” given with imperturbably friendly composure; but there the matter rests.  You know my exemplary patience in waiting, but everything has its limits; afterwards there will be wild galloping, so that on these bad roads horse and carriage break down, and at last we reach the place on foot.  I have meanwhile drunk three glasses of tea and annihilated several eggs; the efforts at getting warm have also so perfectly succeeded that I feel the need of fresh air.  I should, out of sheer impatience, commence shaving if I had a glass.  This city is very straggling, and very foreign-looking, with its green-roofed churches and innumerable cupolas; quite different from Amsterdam, but both the most original cities I know.  No German guard has a conception of the luggage people drag with them into the railway carriage; not a Russian goes without two real pillows in white pillow-cases, children in baskets, and masses of eatables of every kind.  Out of politeness they bowed me into a sleeping car, where I was worse off than in my seat.  Altogether, it is astonishing to me to see the fuss made here about a journey.

Moscow, June 8th.

This city is really, as a city, the handsomest and most original existing:  the environs are cheerful, not pretty, not ugly; but the view from the top of the Kremlin on this panorama of green-roofed houses, gardens, churches, spires of the strangest possible form and color, mostly green, or red or bright blue, generally crowned at the top with a gigantic golden onion, and mostly five or more on one church,—­there are certainly a thousand steeples!—­anything more strangely beautiful than all this lit up by the slanting rays of the setting sun it is impossible to see.  The weather has cleared up again, and I should stay here a few days longer if there were not rumors of a great battle in Italy, which may perhaps bring diplomatic work in its train, so I will be off there and get back to my post.  The house in which I am writing is, curiously enough, one of the few that survived 1812; old, thick walls, like those at Schoenhausen, Oriental architecture, big Moorish rooms.