When we attain to the reality of our visions, in point of locality at least, we find a definite starting-point ready to our hand, where veracious legend and more veracious history are satisfactorily blended. It is at the eastern extremity of the famous broad avenue,--which is the meaning of Prospekt. Here, on the bank of the Neva, tradition alleges that Alexander, Prince of Novgorod, won his great battle--and, incidentally, his surname of Nevsky and his post of patron saint of Russia--over the united forces of the Swedes and oppressive Knights of the Teutonic Order, in the year 1240. Nearly five hundred years later, the spot was occupied by Rhitiowa, one of the forty Finnish villages scattered over the present site of St. Petersburg, as designated by the maps of the Swedes, whom Peter the Great--practically Russia's second patron saint--expelled anew when he captured their thriving commercial town, on the shore of the Neva, directly opposite, now known as Malaya Okhta, possessed of extensive foreign trade, and of a church older than the capital, which recently celebrated its two-hundredth anniversary. It was in 1710 that Peter I. named the place "Victory," in honor of Prince-Saint Alexander Nevsky's conquest, and commanded the erection of a Lavra, or first-class monastery, the seat of a Metropolitan and of a theological seminary. By 1716 the monastery was completed, in wood, as engravings of that day show us, but in a very different form from the complex of stone buildings of the present day. Its principal facade, with extensive, stiffly arranged gardens, faced upon the river,--the only means of communication in that town, planted on a bog, threaded with marshy streams, being by boat. In fact, for a long time horses were so scarce in the infant capital, where reindeer were used in sledges even as late as the end of the last century, that no one was permitted to come to Court, during Peter the Great's reign, otherwise than by water. Necessity and the enforced cultivation of aquatic habits in his inland subjects, which the enterprising Emperor had so much at heart, combined to counsel this regulation. The bones of Prince Alexander were brought to St. Petersburg, from their resting-place in the Vladimir Government, in 1724, Peter the Great occupying his favorite post as pilot and steersman in the saint's state barge, and they now repose in the monastery cathedral, under a canopy, and in a tomb of silver, 3600 pounds in weight, given by Peter's daughter, the devout Empress Elizabeth. In the cemetery surrounding the cathedral, under the fragrant firs and birches, with the blue Neva rippling far below, lie many of the men who have contributed to the advancement of their country in literature, art, and science, during the last two centuries.