Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 September 1892 — WONDERFUL ST. PETERSBUPG. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

WONDERFUL ST. PETERSBUPG.

As 8««n Through the Eyes of a Famous American Correspondent. I wish I could give you a stereopticon view of St. Petersburg, writes Frank G. Carpenter. It is one of the queerest, one of the fastest, one cf the gayest, and by all odds the most unique capital of the world. Lying as it does on the great Gulf of Finland, a river as wide as the Mississippi at St. Louis runs through it and great canals cut it up so that it looks like a second Venice. It is a city of wide streets, of big three, four and five story flats; of vast palaces, many of which cover acres; of a multitude of gorgeous churches, of great schools, of art galleries, of factories, and the thousand and oue other features which make up the capital of the greatest empire on tho globe. You have heard the story of its building. I stood yesterday in the log hut that Peter the Great built on the swamp here when he decided that ho would make this point his capital. All this was a forest, a marsh and a wilderness. The Russia of that day, as the Russia of this, was in the interior, but Peter decided he wanted to have his capital where he could look out upon Europe and he called St. Petersburg his window, and, like Aladdin, he made it rise upon the mud in almost a night. He mad# noble in tho empire build a house here. Every boat on the Baltic and the Russian rivers had to draw a load of stone to the city, and 40,000 men worked year in and year out till the great capital rose. Fully a gen. eration after New York was founded the wolves howled in the wilderness on the site of St. Petersburg; now a city of stone and brick twenty-live miles in circumferance floats here, as It were, almost upon the waters, and 100,000,000 heads bow down to this as th.e seat of their ruler. Piles by the million have been driven down to make foundations. The great River Neva is walled for miles with granite docks and all the streets are paved. Our public buildings at Washington are large, but those of Russia cover far greater areas. The only things that compare with them are the mammoth structures of the Chicago Exposition, and as to the churches here, one of them, St. Isaac’s Cathedral, has cost nearly $20,000,000, or as much as will be the total outlay of the Exposition, There are other churches nearly as expensive, and the whole city has been built without regard to cost. It is almost a Sabbath day’s Journey to go through some of these palaces. The winter palace, on the banks of the Neva, would spoil the area of a ten-acre Held, and its corridors, if stretched out, would reach miles. There is a

tradition that some of tho unused rooms were turned into a barnyard by the servants In years past, and that when the palace once burned a cow was hauled out with the furniture. It is the same with private houses. The people live In flats, and these flats make up In area what they lack In height. It takes nearly a square for the ordinary house, and the Hotel de I’Europe, where I am stopping, has halls which seem to be a mile long, and I lose myself again and again going to my room. The business blocks are big, and there Is a great bazar here, where hundreds of merchants have stores facing a vaulted arcade which covers a vast area, and which Is thronged from morning till night with thousands of shoppers.

ST. ISAAC’S CATHEDRAI. [Ono of St Petersburg's moat magnificent edifices.]