no purpose.  At this he got furious and swore to be avenged.  He led the horse out of the stable, tied it to a post, and beat it with a thick stick for a quarter of an hour so violently that my heart bled for the poor animal.  At last the chevochic was tired out, and taking the horse back to the stable he fastened up his head once more, and to my astonishment it began to devour its provender with the greatest appetite.  At this the master jumped for joy, laughed, sang, and committed a thousand extravagancies, as if to shew the horse how happy it had made him.  I was beside myself with astonishment, and concluded that such treatment would have succeeded nowhere but in Russia, where the stick seems to be the panacea or universal medicine.

They tell me, however, that the stick is gradually going out of fashion.  Peter the Great used to beat his generals black and blue, and in his days a lieutenant had to receive with all submission the cuffs of his captain, who bent before the blows of his major, who did the same to his colonel, who received chastisement from his general.  So I was informed by old General Woyakoff, who was a pupil of Peter the Great, and had often been beaten by the great emperor, the founder of St. Petersburg.

It seems to me that I have scarcely said anything about this great and famous capital, which in my opinion is built on somewhat precarious foundations.  No one but Peter could have thus given the lie to Nature by building his immense palaces of marble and granite on mud and shifting sand.  They tell me that the town is now in its manhood, to the honour of the great Catherine; but in the year 1765 it was still in its minority, and seemed to me only to have been built with the childish aim of seeing it fall into ruins.  Streets were built with the certainty of having to repair them in six months’ time.  The whole place proclaimed itself to be the whim of a despot.  If it is to be durable constant care will be required, for nature never gives up its rights and reasserts them when the constraint of man is withdrawn.  My theory is that sooner or later the soil must give way and drag the vast city with it.

We reached Moscow in the time the chevochic had promised.  As the same horses were used for the whole journey, it would have been impossible to travel mote quickly.  A Russian told me that the Empress Elizabeth had done the journey in fifty-two hours.

“You mean that she issued a ukase to the effect that she had done it,” said a Russian of the old school; “and if she had liked she could have travelled more quickly still; it was only a question of the wording of the ukase.”