"At every 'verst,' which is not quite a mile, a small house is placed at the roadside, on which, in very large figures, the number of versts from St. Petersburg is told. The train runs very smoothly and very slowly; twenty miles an hour is about the rate. Of course the journey seemed long. For a large part of the way it was an uninhabited, level plain; so green, however, that it seemed like travelling on prairies. Occasionally we passed a dreary little village of small huts, and as we neared St. Petersburg we passed larger and better built towns, which the dome of some cathedral lighted up for miles. "The road was enlivened, too, by another peculiarity. The restaurants were all adorned by flags of all colors, and festooned by vines. At one place the green arches ran across the road, and we passed under a bower of evergreens. I accepted this, at first, as a Russian peculiarity, and was surprised that so much attention was paid to travellers; but I learned that it was not for us at all. The Duke of Edinboro' had passed over the road a few days before, on his way to St. Petersburg, for his betrothal to the only daughter of the czar, and the decorations were for him; and so we felt that we were of the party, although we had not been asked. "We approached St. Petersburg just at night, and caught the play of the sunlight on the domes. It is a city of domes--blue domes, green domes, white domes, and, above all, the golden dome of the Cathedral of St. Isaac's. "It is almost never a single dome. St. Isaac's central, gilded dome looms up above its fellow domes, but four smaller ones surround it. "It was summer; the temperature was delightful, about like our October. The showers were frequent, there was no dust and no sultry air. "There must be a great deal of nice mechanical work required in St. Petersburg, for on the Nevsky Perspective, the principal street, there were a great many shops in which graduating and measuring instruments of very nice workmanship were for sale. Especially I noticed the excellence of the thermometers, and I naturally stopped to read them. Figures are a common language, but it was clear that I was in another planet; I could not read the thermometers! I judged that the weather was warm enough for the thermometer to be at 68. I read, say, 16. And then I remembered that the Russians do not put their freezing point at 32, as we do, and I was obliged to go through a troublesome calculation before I could tell how warm it was.