Between the village where he lived and Moscow lay the foreign settlement to which I have occasionally referred, and here Peter got some education. The neat brick villas did not impress his imagination, for he had not even an elementary taste, but he had a mechanical, inquiring mind, and the instruments these foreigners brought into the heart of Russia piqued and stimulated him. Somehow these people beyond the plains could do everything better than the Russians. They could make clocks, watches, astronomical instruments, elaborate tools, superb weapons, magnificent fire-arms. He heard that they could make ships compared with which his boats on the lake were like children’s toys. He must get these secrets for Russia. One secret he learned--the making of fireworks--and the whole country reeked and stank with his constant displays. And they could drink, these English and Scots and Germans of the foreign quarter. Caravans of wine and brandy poured into the quarter, and Peter would come along, black with the smoke of his fireworks or streaming with perspiration from drill or shipbuilding, and sit down to a glorious carouse. His great friend was a Swiss named Lefort, whose capacity for drink was phenomenal. Peter built a small palace, with a huge ballroom, for Lefort, and made it the headquarters of their debauches. It was a general rule that everybody was drunk every night. If a woman refused a pot of brandy Peter would fetch her a clap on the side of the head to which drunkenness was preferable. Decent women kept far away from the two colonies. Peter sober had little self-restraint, but Peter drunk . . . The shipping idea grew upon him until, in 1693--he had wasted four years since the retirement of Sophia--he decided to visit Archangel. It is curious to read of such a man asking, like a boy, his mother’s permission, and promising not to go upon the water. He, of course, took no notice of his promise when he got there and saw the ocean. A ship he had ordered from Amsterdam was out in the roads and he impulsively started off in a totally unsuitable boat to visit it. He was nearly drowned. When he trod the deck, dressed as a Dutch captain, and saw the great sails belly in the wind above him, he went into transports. He sat for hours drinking hard with the Dutch sailors and listening to stories of their voyages round the world. There was no country like Holland, and he there and then adopted for Russia the Dutch red, white and blue flag, reversing the order of the colours. In January he was summoned back to Moscow with the news that his mother was dying. She died so slowly, and kept him so long from the sea, that he cursed volubly. But he shed copious tears, boy as he was, when she died; and he fled like the wind back to Archangel.