By this time the Finnish sailors were hauling in the slack hawsers, and the bearded stevedores on the floating quay tugged at the gangway.  Many of our presumed passengers had only come to say good-bye, which they were now waving and shouting from the shore.  The rain fell dismally, and a black, hopeless sky settled down upon the Neva.  But the Northern summer, we knew, is as fickle as the Southern April, and we trusted that Sergius and Herrmann, the saints of Valaam, would smooth for us the rugged waters of Ladoga.  At last the barking little bell ceased to snarl at the tardy pilgrims.  The swift current swung our bow into the stream, and, as we moved away, the crowd on deck uncovered their heads, not to the bowing friends on the quay, but to the spire of a church which rose to view behind the houses fronting the Neva.  Devoutly crossing themselves with the joined three fingers, symbolical of the Trinity, they doubtless murmured a prayer for the propitious completion of the pilgrimage, to which, I am sure, we could have readily echoed the amen.

The Valamo was particularly distinguished, on this occasion, by a flag at the fore, carrying the white Greek cross on a red field.  This proclaimed her mission as she passed along, and the bells of many a little church pealed God-speed to her and her passengers.  The latter, in spite of the rain, thronged the deck, and continually repeated their devotions to the shrines on either bank.  On the right, the starry domes of the Smolnoi, rising from the lap of a linden—­grove, flashed upon us; then, beyond the long front of the college of demoiselles nobles and the military storehouses, we hailed the silver hemispheres which canopy the tomb and shrine of St. Alexander of the Neva.  On the left, huge brick factories pushed back the gleaming groves of birch, which flowed around and between them, to dip their hanging boughs in the river; but here and there peeped out the bright green cupolas of some little church, none of which, I was glad to see, slipped out of the panorama without its share of reverence.

For some miles we sailed between a double row of contiguous villages,—­a long suburb of the capital, which stretched on and on, until the slight undulations of the shore showed that we had left behind us the dead level of the Ingrian marshes.  It is surprising what an interest one takes in the slightest mole-hill, after living for a short time on a plain.  You are charmed with an elevation which enables you to look over your neighbor’s hedge.  I once heard a clergyman, in his sermon, assert that “the world was perfectly smooth before the fall of Adam, and the present inequalities in its surface were the evidences of human sin.”  I was a boy at the time, and I thought to myself, “How fortunate it is that we are sinners!” Peter the Great, however, had no choice left him.  The piles he drove in these marshes were the surest foundation of his empire.