Memoirs of a Revolutionist

to the present time its different parts have wonderfully well retained the features which have been stamped upon them in the slow course of history. The Trans-Moskva River district, with its broad, sleepy streets and its monotonous gray-painted, low-roofed houses, of which the entrancegates remain securely bolted day and night, has always been the secluded abode of the merchant class, and the stronghold of the outwardly austere, formalistic, and despotic Nonconformists of the “Old Faith.” The citadel, or Kreml, is still the stronghold of church and state ; and the immense space in front of it, covered with thousands of shops and warehouses, has been for centuries a crowded beehive of commerce, and still remains the heart of a great internal trade which spreads over the whole surface of the vast empire. ‘The Tverskaya and the Smiths’ Bridge have been for hundreds of years the chief centres for the fashionable shops; while the artisans’ quarters, the Pluschfkha and the Dorogomilovka, retain the very same features which characterized their uproarious populations in the times of the Moscow Tsars. ach quarter isa little world in itself ; each has its own physiognomy, and lives its own separate ae MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST ae MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST life. Even the railways —— when they made an irrupticn into the old capital — grouped apart in special centres on the outskirts of the old town their stores and machineworks, their heavily loaded carts and engines. However, of all parts of Moscow, none, perhaps, is more typical than that labyrinth of clean, quiet, winding streets and lanes which lies at the back of the Kreml, between two great radial streets, the Arbat and the Prechistenka, and is still called the Old Equerries’ Quarter, — the Staraya Konytishennaya.…