My last day at St. Petersburg is even more crowded than the rest of the week has been. Calls of farewell, final preparations, leaving cards and inscribing my name in visiting-books, occupy the greater part of it. But this going to and fro gives me opportunity of seeing it again from end to end in all its immensity before I leave. What an extraordinary idea to build a town in the midst of a marsh! to dig canals where one cannot build roads, and to be surrounded with a plain as flat as a table. Peter the Great must have been very much impressed by Amsterdam! There are corners in St. Petersburg drenched and misty as on the borders of the Zuyder Zee. But if it has reminiscences of quiet, home-like Holland, again there are brilliant thoroughfares like a Parisian boulevard. The Nevsky Prospect, in its bustle and traffic, full of colour and of life, is unique. Nevsky is the main artery of the capital--palaces belonging to the Imperial family and the grandees, public buildings, bazaars, workshops, and every edifice you can think of. And each is of different style, each of different height, and each is painted in a different hue of the rainbow. Its main feature--I dare say attraction--is its incoherence. During this last week the Russian metropolis presented itself to me from a thousand different sides, and in how many different lights too! Trying to remember them all before I depart for good, I do so with preference for what was pleasant, instructive, and good. Besides, I do not come to criticize, I merely come to pass through, and so I prefer to put down in my diary what might prove instructive. I fully understand the great attraction which St. Petersburg always has for foreigners. I admit it also, though I should not choose it for my residence or for my sphere of labour. The polish is perfect, and of course, if one does not belong to a country, as a passing visitor one scarcely requires more. The conditions of life--at least, for the well-to-do--are most agreeable; manners all that can be desired; refinement exquisite. I do not think you can come in contact anywhere with better informed and more richly equipped people than here. Some of the scientific institutions, like the Naval Academy and the Public Library, are quite remarkable; and the new Polytechnic School--a regular town in itself, with its five faculties and its laboratories--stands alone. Then the museums and galleries contain the most celebrated art treasures. The famous Hermitage, large as it is, can scarcely hold them all. Antiques, gems, jewels, weapons, vases, engravings, and pictures, all of the first order; and I must say they appreciate what they do possess, and the arrangements of the museums are excellent. Unquestionably there is a highly intellectual current, or, if you would prefer to call it so, undercurrent, which comes to brilliant manifestations here and there; sometimes most unexpectedly, amid squalor and debris.