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was born in 1672 and died in 1725. Though he lived in a very wild and romantic time, he did many things which were of lasting benefit to his country. One of these was to plan and build the first Russian boat, at Moscow.

Many years after its completion, when the Russian navy was established, this little vessel was taken a barge to St. Petersburg, where it was received with great ceremony.

The next day it was removed from the barge and rowed out into the bay, with the Emperor and several of the high officials on board. Not far away was the entire Russian feet, arranged in the form of a semicircle. So the little vessel went back and forth across the bay, and was saluted by the discharge of three hundred guns each time it approached the fleet, and heartily cheered by the crowd on the shore.

That night the , as it was so significantly called, was put into the dock at St. Petersburg, where it remained for some time.



the city of St. Petersburg, near the Alexander Column, stands the Winter Palace, one of the largest buildings in the world, and during the greater part of the year it is the residence of the Czar.

It is superbly situated, for close beside it rolls the river Neva, like flood of silver.

In one of the rooms of the Winter Palace, guarded night and day, are kept the crown jewels of Russia. It would be difficult to imagine anything more significent than the imperial crown. It is in the form of a dome, the summit of which consists of a cross of large diamonds resting on an immense ruby. This ruby, with its cross, is poised on arches of diamonds, whose bases rest upon a circle of twenty-eight other diamonds, that clasp the brow of the emperor, “The crown of the empress also contains no less than one hundred_ splendid diamonds, and is, perhaps, the most beautiful mass of these precious stones ever formed into a single ornament.