Page:The Boy Travellers in the Russian Empire.djvu/247

Rh the time of Boris Godounoff, and a traveller in 1611 mentions a bell in Russia which required twenty-four men to swing the clapper. During a fire it fell to the ground and was broken; in 1654 it was recast, and weighed at that time 288,000 pounds. Twenty years later it was suspended from a wooden beam at the foot of the tower; the beam gave way during a fire in 1706, and the bell was again broken. The Empress Anne ordered it recast in 1733, but it only lasted four years. The falling of some rafters in 1737 broke the bell as we now see it, and it lay on the ground just ninety-nine years, or until 1836, when it was raised and placed in its present position by the Emperor Nicholas.

"And how large do you think it is?

"It is thought to weigh 444,000 pounds, or 220 tons; it is nineteen feet three inches in height, and sixty feet nine inches in circumference, or twenty feet three inches in diameter. Just stop and measure these figures with your eye in a barn or a large room of a house, and then realize what this great bell is.

"Look at the picture of the bell, and see the piece that is broken out of it. This piece is six feet high, and both of us walked through the place left by its removal without any difficulty. There is an inscription on the bell which gives its history, and it presents also several sacred figures and the portraits of the Czar Alexis and the Empress Anne.

"From the Great Bell we went to the Nicholas Palace, which occupies the site of the one destroyed by the French at the time of their retreat, and then to the Bolshoi Dvorets, or Great Palace.

"The state apartments are numerous and gorgeous; their number is absolutely bewildering, and so is the array of furniture, paintings, statuary, and other valuables that are gathered there. In the Emperor's cabinet there are pictures representing the battles of Borodino and Smolensk, and also of the French entering and leaving Moscow. There are halls