be crossed when the family carriage stands at the door, like the most characteristic streets in Nantucket.  Some of the doorplates—­which are large squares of tin fastened over the porte cochere, or on the gate of the courtyard—­bear titles.  Next door, perhaps, stands a log house, flush with the sidewalk, its moss calking plainly visible between the huge ribs, its steeply sloping roof rising, almost within reach, above a single story; and its serpent-mouthed eave-spouts ingeniously arranged to pour a stream of water over the vulgar pedestrian.  The windows, on a level with the eyes of the passer-by, are draped with cheap lace curtains.  The broad expanse of cotton wadding between the double windows is decorated, in middle-class taste, with tufts of dyed grasses, colored paper, and other execrable ornaments.  Here, as everywhere else in Moscow, one can never get out of eye-shot of several churches; white with brilliant external frescoes, or the favorite mixture of crushed strawberry and white, all with green roofs and surmounted with domes of ever-varying and original forms and colors, crowned with golden crosses of elaborate and beautiful designs.  Ask a resident, whether prince or peasant, “How many churches are there in ’Holy Moscow town’?” The answer invariably is, “Who knows?  A forty of forties,” which is the old equivalent, in the Epic Songs, of incalculable numbers.  After a while one really begins to feel that sixteen hundred is not an exaggerated estimate.

Very few of the streets in any part of the town are broad; all of them seem like lanes to a Petersburger, and “they are forever going up and down,” as a Petersburg cabman described the Moscow hills to me, in serious disapproval.  He had found the ground too excitingly uneven and the inhabitants too evenly dull to live with for more than a fortnight, he confessed to me.  Many of the old mansions in the centre of the town have been converted into shops, offices, and lodgings; and huge, modern business buildings have taken the places formerly occupied, I presume, by the picturesque “hovels” of the travelers’ tales.

One of the most interesting places in the White Town to me was the huge foundling asylum, established by Katherine II., immediately after her accession to the throne.  There are other institutions connected with it, such as a school for orphan girls.  But the hospital for the babies is the centre of interest.  There are about six hundred nurses always on hand.  Very few of them have more than one nursling to care for, and a number of babies who enter life below par, so to speak, are accommodated with incubators.  The nurses stand in battalions in the various large halls, all clad alike, with the exception of the woolen kokoshnik,—­ the coronet-shaped headdress with its cap for the hair,—­which is of a different color in each room.  It requires cords of “cartwheels”—­the big round loaves of black bread—­to feed this army of nurses.  If they are not fed on their ordinary peasant food, cabbage soup and sour black bread, they fall ill and the babies suffer, as no bottles are used.