There are the Tartar guards, and the Circassian guards, Cossacks from the Don, from the Ural, and from Crimea; guards with names ending with “_off_” and “_ski_,” unpronounceable by Western lips. The wild Circassian—enacting the double part of soldier and hostage—silver-harnessed and mail-coated, alternates with the skin-clad Cossack of the Ural, darting, lance in rest, over the parade-ground. There are regiments uniform not only in size of the men, color of the horses, and identity of equipments, but in the minutiæ of personal appearance. Of one, all the men are pug-nosed, blue-eyed, and red bearded; of another, every man has a nose like a hawk, with eyes, hair and beard as black as a raven’s wing. Half the male population of St. Petersburg wear uniform; for, besides these 60,000 soldiers, it is worn by officers of every grade, by the police, and even by professors of the university, and by teachers and pupils in the public schools. Turning from the military to the civil portion of the population, the same brilliant variety of costumes every where meets the eye. The sober-suited native of western and civilized Europe, jostles the brilliant silken robes of the Persian or Bokharian; the Chinaman flaunts his dangling pig-tail, ingeniously pieced out by artificial means, in the face of the smoothly-shorn Englishman; the white-toothed Arab meets the tobacco-stained German; Yankee sailors and adventurers, portly English merchants, canny Scotchmen, dwarfish Finlanders, stupid Lettes, diminutive Kamtschatkians, each in his own national costume, make up a lively picture; while underlying all, and more worthy of note than all, are the true Russian peasantry; the original stock out of which Peter and his successors have fashioned their mighty empire.