appearance of solidity.  A few days are sufficient for building them; they are very often consumed by fire, and an order is sent to the forest for a house, as you would send to market to lay in your winter stock of provisions.  In the middle of these huts, however, palaces have been erected, and a number of churches, whose green and gilt cupolas singularly draw the attention.  When towards the evening the sun darts his rays on these brilliant domes, you would fancy that it was rather an illumination for a festival, than a durable edifice.

The Russians never pass a church without making the sign of the cross, and their longbeards add greatly to the religious expression of their physiognomy.  They generally wear a large blue robe, fastened round the waist by a scarlet band:  the dresses of the women have also something Asiatic in them:  and one remarks that taste for lively colours which we derive from the East, where the sun is so beautiful, that one likes to make his eclat more conspicuous by the objects which he shines upon.  I speedily contracted such a partiality to these oriental dresses, that I could not bear to see Russians dressed like other Europeans; they seemed to me then entering into that great regularity of the despotism of Napoleon, which first makes all nations a present of the conscription, then of the war-taxes, and lastly, of the Code Napoleon, in order to govern in the same manner, nations of totally different characters.

The Dnieper, which the ancients called Borysthenes, passes by Kiow, and the old tradition of the country affirms, that it was a boatman, who in crossing it found its waters so pure that he was led to found a town on its banks.  In fact, the rivers are the most beautiful natural objects in Russia.  It would be difficult to find any small streams, their course would be so much obstructed by the sand.  There is scarcely any variety of trees; the melancholy birch is incessantly recurring in this uninventive nature; even the want of stones might be almost regretted, so much is the eye sometimes fatigued with meeting neither hill nor valley, and to be always making progress without encountering new objects.  The rivers relieve the imagination from this fatigue; the priests, therefore, bestow their benedictions on these rivers.  The emperor, empress, and the whole court attend the ceremony of the benediction of the Neva, at the moment of the severest cold of winter.  It is said that Wladimir, at the commencement of the eleventh century, declared, that all the waters of the Borysthenes were holy, and that plunging in them was sufficient to make a man a Christian; the baptism of the Greeks being performed by immersion, millions of men went into this river to abjure their idolatry.  It was this same Vladimir who sent deputies to different countries, to learn which of all the religions it best suited him to adopt; he decided for the Greek ritual, on account of the pomp of its ceremonies.  Perhaps also he preferred it for more important reasons; in fact the Greek faith by excluding the papal power, gives the sovereign of Russia the spiritual and temporal power united.