AT nine in the morning we were to be on board the steamer WYBORG, Captain Nystrom, to go from St. Petersburg to Finland, and thence to Sweden. When we reached the wharf, so great was the crowd of passengers and the crush of luggage and the pressure of freight, that it seemed doubtful if we should be able to get on board. It was summer time, very hot, and the people who had not yet escaped from the city heat, and were able to, were rushing to their rural residences on the sea-coast. They are as much in the habit of this, as our rich people at home are of flying in midsummer to the hills or the sea-shore. Americans are abroad. Four or five families from the city of New York met on the deck of this steamer, all of whom were making this northern tour, and none of whom were known to each other as away from home. As the boat was to be our hotel for several days, this sudden accession of neighbors was very agreeable, and made the prospect of the excursion more pleasant. And gradually this circle widened, till it embraced Russians and Finns and Swedes and English, with whom our own tongue was more easily a means of communication than it was in Italy or Spain. We are steaming out of one of the four mouths of the Neva, as it widens into the Gulf of Finland, and for several miles the intricate channel is staked out with care. CRONSTADT is the famous port of St. Petersburg, one of the strongest fortifications in the world, and we had expected to see a frowning precipice, a long and lofty range of rocks, defying attack, a Gibraltar in the north of Europe. There is no rock at all. The fortifications are low, and all the more impregnable for that; but we were taken down by their appearance, the situation being so widely different from our anticipations. Napier came here with the British fleet, at the opening of the war that was afterwards called the _Crimean_, for the very good reason that when the Admiral hurled the whole power of the navy of England against Cronstadt in vain, the war was prosecuted to its close in the southern part of the Russian empire, the Crimea. The approach to Cronstadt is difficult, and the channel easily defended by the immense fortifications which successive emperors have constructed, well knowing that this is the northern gate of the empire. The dry docks are on a gigantic scale, to meet the demands of a first-class naval power, which Russia is not, and will never be till she moves her seat of government and field of operations to the Bosphorus. Forests of masts, denser forests of masts than we had seen since leaving New York, stood along the docks of Cronstadt. A steamer crowded with passengers, from stem to stern, passed us as we were lying here; she was bound to Revel, and all the Russian coast of the Gulf of Finland. The people are apparently as given to travel as the Americans.