“Far be it from me.  Rather let me perish by the hand of my master.”  The tzar, enraged and intoxicated, raised his arm to strike, when one of the retinue seized the uplifted hand and averted the blow.  Peter immediately recovered his self-possession, and sheathing his sword said to his embassador,

“I ask your pardon.  It is my great desire to reform my subjects, and yet I am ashamed to confess that I am unable to reform myself.”

From Konigsburg they continued their route to Berlin, and thence to Hamburg, near the mouth of the Elbe, which was, even then, an important maritime town.  They then turned their steps towards Amsterdam.  As soon as they reached Emmeric, on the Rhine, the tzar, impatient of the slow progress of the embassage, forsook his companions, and hiring a small boat, sailed down the Rhine and proceeded to Amsterdam, reaching that city fifteen days before the embassy.  “He flew through the city,” says one of the annalists of those days, “like lightning,” and proceeded to a small but active sea-port town on the coast, Zaandam.  The first person they saw here was a man fishing from a small skiff, at a short distance from the shore.  The tzar, who was dressed like a common Dutch skipper, in a red jacket and white linen trowsers, hailed the man, and engaged lodgings of him, consisting of two small rooms with a loft over them, and an adjoining shed.  Strangely enough, this man, whose name was Kist, had been in Russia working as a smith, and he knew the tzar.  He was strictly enjoined on no account to let it be known who his lodger was.

A group soon gathered around the strangers, with many questions.  Peter told them that they were carpenters and laborers from a foreign country in search of work.  But no one believed this, for the attendants of the tzar still wore the rich robes which constituted the costume of Russia.  With sympathy as beautiful as it is rare, Peter called upon several families of ship carpenters who had worked for him and with him at Archangel, and to some of these families he gave valuable presents, which he said that the tzar of Russia had sent to them.  He clothed himself, and ordered his companions to clothe themselves, in the ordinary dress of the dockyard, and purchasing carpenters’ tools they all went vigorously to work.

The next day was the Sabbath.  The arrival of these strangers, so peculiar in aspect and conduct, was noised abroad, and when Peter awoke in the morning he was greatly annoyed by finding a large crowd assembled before his door.  Indeed the rumor of the Russian embassage, and that the tzar himself was to accompany it, had already reached Amsterdam, and it was shrewdly suspected that these strangers were in some way connected with the expected arrival of the embassadors.  One of the barbers in Amsterdam had received from a ship carpenter in Archangel a portrait of the tzar, which had been for some time hanging in his shop.  He was with the crowd around the door.  The moment his eye rested upon Peter, he exclaimed, with astonishment, “that is the tzar!” His form, features and character were all so marked that he could not easily be mistaken.