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the town’s pale and clerkish inhabitants would exchange the Nevski Prospect for any earthly blessing. Not only the possessor of twenty-five years, a handsome moustache and an amazingly tailored frock-coat, but even the man whose chin sprouts white hairs and whose head is as smooth as a silver dish, waxes enthusiastic about the Nevski Prospect. And the ladies! Oh, to the ladies the Nevski Prospect is an even greater delight! But who is not delighted with it? You hardly enter the Nevski Prospect, when you catch the fragrance of the purest sauntering. Even if you had some important essential business, you would probably forget it all as soon as you stepped into the street. This is the one single place where people do not show themselves because they have to, where they are not driven by necessity and the commercial interest which embraces the whole of St. Petersburg. It seems as if the man one meets in the Nevski Prospect is less of an egoist than those in the Morskaya, Gorokhovaya, Liteynaya, Meshchanskaya and other streets, where greed, self-interest and necessity are stamped on the passers-by and on those flying along in carriages and drozhki. The Nevski Prospect is the common meeting-ground of St. Petersburg. A man who lives in the Petersburg or Viborg district and who has not been to see his friend at the Sands or the Moscow Gates for several years, can be certain that they will come across each other here. No address book and no inquiry office can produce such correct information as the Nevski Prospect. Omnipotent Nevski Prospect! Unique incitement for the poor man in St. Petersburg to take a walk. How clean-swept are its pavements and, heavens, how many feet have left their trace upon it! The clumsy dirty boot of the retired soldier beneath whose weight the very granite seems to crack, and the miniature slipper, light as smoke, of the young lady who turns her little head towards the dazzling shop windows like a sunflower towards the sun, and the hopeful ensign’s rattling sabre, which draws a sharp scratch over its surface—everything is avenged upon it by the power of strength or the power of weakness. How swift the phantasmagoria which develops there in the course of a single day! How many metamorphoses it undergoes within twenty-four hours! Let us begin from very early morning when all St. Petersburg smells of hot newly-baked bread and is crowded with old women in tattered dresses and cloaks effecting their incursions upon the churches and compassionate passers-by.
    Then the Nevski Prospect is empty: the burly shopkeepers and their clerks are either still sleeping in their holland shirts or lathering the honorable cheek and drinking coffee; beggars gather at the doors of the pastry-cooks where the sleepy Ganymede who flew about like a fly yesterday with cups of chocolate, crawls out now with a broom in his hand, without a tie, and flings them stale patties and leavings. Along the streets amble men who must; occasionally Russian peasants cross the road hurrying to work in boots muddied with lime, which even the canal of Catherine the Great, famous for its cleanliness, could not possibly cleanse. It is usually indecorous for ladies to walk out at this time, because the Russian people like to express themselves in words so crude that ladies are not likely to meet with them even at the theatre. Now and then a somnolent clerk ambles by with his brief-case under his arm, if his way to the office lies across the Nevski Prospect. One can say definitely that at this time, until twelve o’clock that is, the Nevski Prospect is not an end in itself for anybody, but serves merely as a means: gradually it becomes thronged with persons who have their own occupations, their own worries and cares, but none of whom gives the Prospect a thought. The Russian peasant talks about a ten- kopek piece or about seven grosh of copper, the old men and old women gesticulate with their arms or talk to themselves, sometimes with