[130] Both thistle and globe artichokes are extensively cultivated for the markets of Stockholm. Tobacco is another crop very often to be seen; its growth is no new industry, it is mentioned by Laing in 1838, and he says it is used largely for snuff. Mere frames of poles on wheels serve for the ingathering of harvest. [131] _The Land of the Midnight Sun_, by Paul Du Chaillu, 1881. The author was French by birth. [132] The form Russia was not known till the end of the seventeenth century. In Great Blakenham Church, Suffolk, there is a monument of 1645 to a London merchant, named Swift "Honoured abroad for wise and just, Aske the Russe and Sweden theis." [133] The original authority for Ruric and his viking followers settling at Novgorod in 862 is the _Chronicle_ of Nestor, a monk of Kiev, who died about 1114. There is a very good account of early Russian history in W. R. Morrill's _Russia_ in the _Story of the Nations_. [134] _Heimskringla, Saga of Olaf Tryggvison_, Ch. VII. [135] _ib._, Ch. XXI. [136] _Saga of Olaf the Holy_, Ch. CXCI. [137] _ib._, Ch. CXCVIII. [138] _Heimskringla, Saga of Harald the Hardredy_, Ch. XVI. [139] My friend, A. Rothay Reynolds, author of _My Russian Year_, has very kindly elicited for me the information that these relics no longer exist. Although the sagas give no hint of any difference of religious views between Russians and Norse (p. 233), the bones of St. Henry were evidently insulted at St. Petersburg, where they might with more appropriateness have been shrined. [140] The present building was erected about 1733 from designs by Tressini, an Italian architect. It is a rather commonplace Classic church whose details are extremely poor, though the interior has a certain impressiveness from the tall pillars supporting the roof, for the usual galleries are not there. Over the windows are cherubs. Over the eastern octagon rises a little onion dome. The tower that surmounts the western front is crowned by the gilded needle spire which soars, out of all proportion to the church, no less than 364 feet into the air, sometimes most impressively catching the light of the setting sun while all is in shadow around. [141] This house contains the very distorting panes of glass that were the earliest to be made in Russia. The only large buildings in the city that Peter ever saw are part of the University and an adjacent palace of Menshikóf, now a school of cadets. Both are stucco and uninteresting; one bears the date 1710. [142] So that it is rather curious that this building should be on the whole the most perfect reproduction of an Italian church in St. Petersburg. There is nothing Russian about it; just an ordinary cruciform domed Renaissance building, 255 feet long.