So soon as I was established in my new dwelling, I visited the town as often as the rigours of the season would permit. For during the five months I spent at Moscow, the snow never melted; it deprived me of the pleasure of seeing the environments, said to be admirable. Moscow is at least ten miles round. The Moskva cuts through the town, and is joined by two other small streams, and it is really an astonishing sight--all those palaces, those finely sculptured public monuments, those convents, those churches, all intermingled with pretty landscapes and villages. This mixture of urban magnificence and rural simplicity produces an extraordinary, fantastic effect, which must please the traveller who is in search of something new. The churches are so numerous in this city that a popular saying runs: "Moscow with its forty times forty churches." Moscow is supposed to contain 420,000 inhabitants, and commerce must be on a large scale, because in a single quarter, whose name I have forgotten, there are six thousand shops. In the quarter called the Kremlin there stands the fortress of the same name, the old palace of the czars. This fortress is as ancient as the town, said to have been built about the middle of the twelfth century, and is situated on an elevation at the foot of which flows the Moskva, but there is nothing remarkable in the style excepting its antiquity. Close to this pile, whose walls are flanked with towers, I was shown a bell of colossal dimensions half-embedded in the ground, and I was told it had never been possible to raise it in order to hang it in the palace chapel. The cemeteries at Moscow are stupendous, and following the custom prevailing all over Russia, several times a year, but especially on the day that in Russia corresponds to our Death Day, the cemeteries are filled with vast crowds. Men and women kneel at their family tombs, and there give vent to loud lamentations, which may be heard a long way off. A habit as universal in Moscow as in St. Petersburg is the taking of steam baths. There are some for women and some for men, only when the men have taken their bath, coming out of it as red as scarlet, they go out and roll in the snow in the most extreme cold. To this habit the vigour and sound health of the Russians have been attributed. It is very certain they know nothing of chest maladies or rheumatism. A pleasant walk in Moscow is the market, which is always to be found provisioned with the rarest and most excellent fruits. It is in the middle of a garden, and is traversed by a broad avenue which renders the place fascinating. It is quite proper for the greatest ladies to go there and do their buying in person. In summer they repair thither in carriages, and in winter in sledges.