"This," said our guide, following the direction of my eyes, "is the Spass Preobrashenskoi Sabor; a church greatly adorned with the spoils of nations vanquished by Russia." "Well," said Whiskerandos, who in the course of his adventurous life had both seen cannon and learnt their use, "perhaps those big instruments of war are just as well up there, where they are seen, and not heard or felt. Man is the only creature, I fancy, who, not content with what powers of destruction nature has given him, cuts down trees from the forest, digs iron from the mine, sets the furnace glowing, and the engine working, to fashion means of killing his brothers in a wholesale manner." "Yonder," said Wisky, pointing with his nose, "are the father of the Russian fleet and the grandmother of the houses of St. Petersburg." "Let's see them by all means!" I exclaimed; "I have viewed plenty of Russian ships and Russian houses, and I have a lively curiosity to see the father and the grandmother of so famous a family!" Wisky rapidly led the way to a hut, into which with little difficulty we entered, for locks and bars do not keep out rats, nor surly porters refuse them admission. "Is this the father of the Russian fleet!" exclaimed Whiskerandos rather contemptuously, running, audacious rat that he was, along the edge of a boat about thirty feet long. "Is Russia a child, that she should amuse herself with a toy, and keep a big boat under a roof where there is no water to float it, as if it were some delicate jewel!" "On no jewel in the Emperor's crown," replied Wisky, "would a Russian look with the same interest as on that poor boat. Peter the Great helped to fashion it himself! He found his country without a navy, and he gave her one; he laboured himself as a common ship-wright: and now, as a mighty oak springs from a single acorn, in that one boat his people view with reverence "The father of the Russian fleet." "And where is the grandmother of the houses?" inquired I. "That is hard by," replied Wisky. "It is nothing but a small wooden cottage which Peter built for himself by the Neva, before a single street stretched across the dreary bog upon which he founded this city of palaces!"