Any traveller might have thanked God for the beauty of that sight. Dome and cupola, minaret and tower, shone beneath them in the evening sunshine, giving back its rays with dazzling brightness from their gilded tops; and some there were which flamed like balls of fire suspended in the air. The brightest and most varied of colours--green, purple, crimson, blue--relieved and diversified the gleaming gold of the cupolas and the burnished lead of the roofs, which looked like silver. Beyond the bewildering glories of the Kremlin, whose feet were kissed by the bright waters of the winding Moskva, the great city stretched away into the distance. To the eye there was no limit: streets and squares and gardens, gardens and streets and squares; here a castle, there a blooming terrace; yonder a painted gateway, everywhere light and colour, and shining metallic surfaces that reflected the sun. “Forty times forty churches” pointed upwards with their “silent fingers,” as if to remind the dwellers in that city of palaces of the yet fairer city which is eternal in the heavens, even the new Jerusalem, with its streets of gold and gates of pearl. Ivan crossed himself. “Beautiful! beautiful!” he murmured, as he gazed like one entranced on the scene before him. “Upon God’s earth there is no spot like that,” said Petrovitch, stretching forth his hand and pointing to the city. “‘If I forget thee, Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.’ God keep Moscow the holy, Moscow the beautiful, the ancient city of the Czar, the fairest jewel of his crown, the apple of his eye!” CHAPTER V. PETROVITCH. “Oh, but soon ye read in stories Of the men of long ago; And the pale, bewildering glories Shining farther than ye know.” Our travellers had still a long drive before them after they entered the stately gate called “the Gate of Triumph.” The ancient capital of the Czars enclosed, within the vast circumference of its painted walls, gardens, orchards, terraces, even parks and pleasure-grounds, in this as in other ways resembling an Eastern city. In due time, however, the merchants’ quarter was reached, and Ivan Petrovitch drew rein before the gateway of a long, low, wooden building, or rather range of buildings, painted in various colours. He was evidently expected and watched for; quite a crowd of men, women, and children, servants or members of the family, hurried out to meet him, and his young companion shared the welcome and the greetings that followed. Ivan Petrovitch, however, took him by the hand, saying to those who were pressing around them, “Stand back, brothers and sisters; no one should speak to the little lord until he has been presented to our father.”