His adventures at Koenigsberg would precede him, and he made his way loutishly from court to court until he reached Holland. Every one knows the idyllic picture of Peter the Great serving a long apprenticeship to shipbuilding in the village of Saardam. It is another exploded myth of our childhood. Peter remained there only a week, staying at the village inn (where he seduced the maid), smoking large pipes and drinking large pots with the boatmen. That he used an adze is certain, but there was little romance. His tall, slovenly form, very untidily dressed in Dutch fashion, attracted the stones of the little boys, and he moved on. He appeared in more polite quarters in a brown overcoat with horn buttons, coarse darned socks, and dirty shoes. Some one suggested that he would see better shipbuilding at London, and he crossed, and bewildered London. He had a fine brown skin and large handsome eyes and thick hair, but, apart from his habitual untidiness of dress, he had a nervous malady which caused a twitching of the limbs and a remarkable habit of grimacing. He constantly took for it a powder made of the flesh and wings of the magpie. At table his habits were atrocious. In fact, he and his servant Menshikoff discovered a little tavern on Tower Hill where he could smoke his pipe and drink peppered brandy as if he were at home. At Deptford, where he lived in Evelyn’s house while he studied shipping, he made such filth and damage that Evelyn estimated the repairs at 1,750 dollars. Here, as elsewhere, his morals were notorious. Professor Morfill politely observes in his “History of Russia”: “The great monarch was somewhat irregular in these matters, it must be confessed.” The phrase would have sent the great monarch into convulsions of horse-laughter. There is grave reason to believe that such irregularities were not his worst vices. The redeeming feature of his journey was that he learned a vast amount in those few months. Much of his learning was a result of sheer nervous instability and did more harm than good. He studied dentistry--the dentistry of the seventeenth century--and took implements home with him, to the terror of his friends. When his valet one day complained to him that his wife refused to discharge her conjugal duty on the ground of tooth-ache, the Tsar had the woman brought to him, and he extracted a tooth. He gathered also a box of surgical instruments, and often used them. On one occasion he tapped a poor woman of Moscow, who suffered from dropsy, and caused her death. He pried into everything, rushing from place to place and working with prodigious energy; though it is said that he ended every day of his life intoxicated. What came of it all for the development of Russia we shall see in the next chapter.