The ghost of Ivan the Terrible walks through the streets of Moscow; nevertheless, the Russians love the place as the Mohammedans love Mecca. It is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and one of the strangest. It has hundreds of churches, so gorged with art treasures and with gold, silver and jewels that it dizzies the mind to contemplate them. It has the ancient wall, foliage-hung, that enclosed the Moscow of the thirteenth century, and it has the Kremlin, or fortress, which antedates the town. Inside the Kremlin is the old palace of the rulers of Russia built, in part, centuries before they became czars. The first Kremlin palaces were built by the dukes of Moscow in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Some of the most beautiful of the treasure churches of the Kremlin were built by Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century. One of these, just outside the walls, the Cathedral of St. Basil, is a gem of such radiance supreme that the half-mad Ivan determined that it should never be surpassed. When it was finished he called the architect to him and asked him if he thought he could ever design a better church. The architect, in the pride and joy of his achievement, modestly said that he thought he might. “You never will,” said the terrible Ivan, and he had the man’s eyes burned out with red-hot irons. In the great square in front of the Kremlin still stands the high place of execution where Ivan and the other almost as terrible czars tortured and slew their victims. In a side street still stands the wonderful golden house which was the home and seat of the Romanoff boyars, and where the first (or second) czar of Russia was born. Moscow is the very symbol of czardom; nevertheless the Russians love it as their heart. Germany might send her armies there, but they could no more take it, or hold it, than they could take and hold Washington. Inside the Kremlin walls lie heaped thousands of bronze cannons, bright and beautiful as snakes, all decorated with eagles and N’s and ambitious mottoes. Napoleon Bonaparte left them there when he fled, defeated and routed by the Russians, only to be still more soundly defeated by snow and storm and bitter cold. Those cannon are evidence indeed of the invincibility of Moscow.