S7\ PETERSBURG. i$ 



greatness, and experience the contrast of a sudden 

 change from the Elysian glories of Peterhoff to the 

 huts of a typical village seventy miles away. Peter- 

 hoff is an Imperial summer residence on the gulf of 

 Finland ; grounds peopled with gilded statuary, amid 

 a magnificent system of fountains. 



Mr. Steveni of the London Daily Chronicle, a resi- 

 dent correspondent, went with me to Tchudovo. 



Tchudovo is about one hundred versts (seventy 

 miles) from St. Petersburg, in the direction of Moscow, 

 a village in the district government of Novgorod. A 

 Russian village is in appearance the counterpart of 

 many small towns in the Western States. The first 

 impression of the writer, who knows the West very 

 well, was that he had stumbled into one of those 

 slowly decaying backwood villages in Missouri or 

 Illinois that have fallen out of joint and behind the 

 times because the railway didn't come through their 

 section of the country. Tchudovo is situated in a 

 country as level and dreary as the dreariest part of any 

 of the prairie States. The land belonging to the 

 village was a big clearing in a level forest country that 

 presented to the eye no single point of interest be- 

 yond the people and their mode of life. The village 

 was like all Russian villages, except that many of the 

 houses were two-storied. It consisted of two rows of 

 houses, between which ran Peter the Great's broad 

 military road to Novgorod. A few of the houses were 

 of brick, but most were of wood. Here as everywhere, 

 though the uniformity of architecture was striking, 

 evidences of wealth and poverty came within the orbit 

 of a glance. Some of the houses were fairly toppling 



