Hardly any good houses. Peasants with hair four or five inches long and wearing sheep skin coats and knee-boots, came to stations to look at the train. The women had shawls over their heads, and squelched through the mud and slush with bare feet. All looked cold and dejected, while the landscape was most depressing.
With the exception of a few wild and tame pigeons, saw hardly any birds, but turkeys at a farm.
Arrived in Moscow at 4 p.m., and drove in a droski (four-wheel cab) to the Slavianski Hotel, where my passport was again required.
In the evening, after an excellent dinner, I went to a first-class variety entertainment at the Aquarium theatre.
My bedroom at the hotel was warmed in a curious manner. There was neither stove nor hot-water-pipe, but in one of the walls at some seven feet from the floor was a round hole about three inches in diameter.
Being curious to know what this hole could be for, I put my hand up to it, and was greatly surprised to find a current of hot air pouring into the room, which was thereby kept at a most comfortable temperature both by day and night.
_20th October._--It was a miserable day with rain and snow, so that while the streets, which are wretchedly paved with big blocks of stone, were bad for wheeled traffic, there was not sufficient snow for sleighing.
In the morning I went to the Kremlin, which comprises the new and old Imperial palaces, churches, treasury, etc., all grouped within a lofty wall, pierced here and there by gateways, one of which being holy, it behoves every good Russian to remove his hat on passing through. In the vast courtyard are ranged in long tiers the many hundreds of cannon which the Russians took from Napoleon I. It is impossible in this brief diary to deal with the splendours of the Kremlin. Nothing I have ever seen in Europe, Asia, Africa or America, can in any way compare with its semi-barbaric magnificence.
The ball-room in the new palace is of immense size and of most majestic proportions, the walls being entirely of mirrors and gold gilt, and the floor richly inlaid with many kinds of beautiful woods. Columns built of malachite, crystal, and precious stones. Stairways of marble and jade, while countless ornaments of pure gold adorned the various apartments. The old palace, which adjoins the new, is smaller, less magnificent, being of cloister like build, but intensely interesting. Here I saw the bedroom and the bed in which Napoleon slept for a few nights before Moscow was laid in ashes by her own inhabitants, and the French invaders driven out to die like flies in the snow.