By day the teamsters stand upon the quay, with rough aprons over their ballet-skirted sheepskin coats, waiting for a job.  If we hire one of them, we shall find that they all belong to the ancient Russian Artel, or Labor Union, which prevents competition beyond a certain point.  When the price has been fixed, after due and inevitable chaffering, one lomovoi grasps his shapeless cap by its worn edge of fur, bites a kopek, and drops it in.  Each of the other men contributes a marked copper likewise, and we are invited to draw lots, in full view, to determine which of them shall have the job.  The master of the Artel sees to it that there is fair play on both sides.  If an unruly member presumes to intervene with a lower bid, with the object of monopolizing the job out of turn, he is promptly squelched, and, though his bid may be allowed to stand, the man whose kopek we have drawn must do the work.  The winner chee-ee-eeps to his little horse, whose shaggy mane has been tangled by the loving hand of the domovoi (house-sprite) and hangs to his knees.  The patient beast, which, like all Russian horses, is never covered, no matter how severe the weather may be, or how hot he may be from exercise, rouses himself from his real or simulated slumber, and takes up the burden of life again, handicapped by the huge wooden arch, gayly painted in flowers and initials, which joins his shafts, and does stout service despite his sorry aspect.

But the early summer is the season when the Fontanka is to be seen in its most characteristic state.  The brilliant blue water sparkles under the hot sun, or adds one more tint to the exquisite hues which make of the sky one vast, gleaming fire-opal on those marvelous “white nights” when darkness never descends to a depth beyond the point where it leaves all objects with natural forms and colors, and only spiritualizes them with the gentle vagueness of a translucent veil.  Small steamers, manned by wooden-faced, blond Finns, connect the unfashionable suburban quarters, lying near the canal’s entrance into the Neva on the west, with the fashionable Court quarter on the northern quays at its other entrance into the Neva, seven versts away.  They dart about like sea-gulls, picking their path, not unfraught with serious danger, among the obstructions.  The obstructions are many:  washing-house boats (it is a good old unexploded theory in Petersburg that clothes are clean only when rinsed in running water, even though our eyes and noses inform us, unaided by chart, where the drainage goes); little flotillas of dingy flat-boats, anchored around the “Fish-Gardens,” and containing the latter’s stock in trade, where persons of taste pick their second dinner-course out of the flopping inmates of a temporary scoop-net; huge, unwieldy, wood barks, put together with wooden pegs, and steered with long, clumsy rudders, which the poor peasants have painfully poled —­tramp, tramp, tramp, along the sides—­through four hundred miles of tortuous waterways from that province of the former haughty republic, “Lord Novgorod the Great,” where Prince Rurik ruled and laid the foundations of the present imperial empire, and whence came Prince-Saint Alexander, to win his surname of Nevsky, as we have seen, at the spot where his monastery stands, a couple of miles, at most, away.