All the caravan had passed, so the clatter of Balgonie's charger, steel-scabbard, and accoutrements, seemed to create a different effect on the attentive ear of the seemingly drowned man; for the knave, who had only been acting, started up, and, with his spoil, fled like a hare down one of the little alleys that opened off the wooden street. He vanished in the twilight, yet not so quickly but that Balgonie was able to recognise in his face and form, the bulky and muscular half-bred, the gipsy, Nicholas Paulovitch. What had brought him to St. Petersburg? Was he still dogging the luckless dispatch-bearer, or had he only fled thither that, among its thousands, he might elude the punishment with which Count Mierowitz would be sure to visit him, if the murder of the Corporal was discovered? This episode made Balgonie feel uncomfortable, and suspicious that other and hidden dangers yet menaced him, as he rode steadily but watchfully through the densely crowded, but monotonously regular streets of houses, which are stuccoed, white-washed, and decorated with different colours, roofed with wood and iron, painted in most instances green, and nearly all pillared and piazzaed--each long vista, with its oil lamps, being terminated by domes and spires; and erelong he saw the lights shining in the lofty windows of that magnificent crescent, which, for a time, was the palace of Catharine's most cherished favourite, "the fair-faced Lanskoi," as Byron has it-- "A lover who had cost her many a tear, And yet but made a middling Grenadier." And now the melodious bells were ringing for vespers in the towers of our Lady of Kazan--a Greek cruciform fane, which was founded as a rival to St. Peter's at Rome, and named after the Tartar kingdom of Kazan. It is the greatest church in the city, and one of high sanctity. Along the northern margin of the Neva, a river broad as the Thames at London Bridge, but (unlike the Thames) deep, blue, and transparent as crystal, lined with solid granite quays, and bordered by many stately palatial edifices, Balgonie pursued his way; but the stars were shining at midnight on the vast sheet of water called the Lake of Ladoga, before he, weary and worn with fatigue, dismounted beneath the formidable gates of the castellated prison of Schlusselburg, which had been strengthened and fortified anew by General Count Todleben, whose arrest and quarrel with the Empress had made so much noise three years before the time our story opens. CHAPTER XIII. WHAT THE SECRET DISPATCH CONTAINED. Twenty-four miles eastward of the city, the small town and fortress of Schlusselburg stand, at a point where the Neva issues from the Lake of Ladoga, and on the left bank of the river. The little town had then somewhere about three thousand inhabitants, who chiefly lived by the manufacture of cotton and porcelain.