It will interest the traveller to visit briefly the great National Riding-School of Moscow, a building embracing an area of five hundred and sixty feet long by one hundred and fifty-eight feet wide. It is covered with what appears to be a flat roof, but is without supporting pillars of any sort on the inside. A full regiment of cavalry can be exercised here with perfect convenience. This was the largest building in the world unsupported by prop of any kind, until the St. Pancras railway station was built in London. The interior is ornamented with bas-reliefs of men in armor and with ancient trophies. By ascending a winding staircase one can see the net-work of massive beams which sustain the roof, a perfect forest of stays and rafters. In a climate such as prevails here at least two thirds of the year, it is impossible to manoeuvre troops in the open air with any degree of comfort, not to say safety; hence this structure was raised and supplied with huge stoves to afford the means of exercising the troops even in mid-winter.
Moscow has four theatres, two only of which are worthy of the traveller's notice. These are the Botshoi and the Italian Opera, where only entertainments of a high order of merit are permitted to be given. In many of the gay cafés young girls of free manners and lax morals dance in national costumes, among whom one easily recognizes those coming from Circassia, Poland, Lithuania, and the country of the Cossacks. In their dances and grouping they present scenes that do not lack for picturesqueness of effect. Most of the melodies one hears at these places are quaint and of local origin, quite new to the ear; though now and again a familiar strain will occur, indicating from whence Chopin and others have borrowed. Some of the performers were so strikingly handsome as to show that their personal charms had been the fatal cause which had brought them into so exposed a connection as these public resorts of evil repute. The Bohemian or gypsy girls were the most attractive,--poor creatures coming from no one knows where, wanderers from their birth, and with lives ever enveloped in mystery. One could not but recall the Latin Quarter of Paris and the gay, dissipated night-resorts of London and Vienna. None of the European capitals are without these dark spots upon the escutcheon of civilization.
