Town was devoted to the purveyors and servants of the Tzars of Muscovy.

St. Nicholas, a very popular saint, heads the list, as usual. "St.
Nicholas on Chips" occupies the spot where a woodyard stood. "St.
Nicholas on the Well," "St. Nicholas Fine Chime," are easily understood.
"St. Nicholas White-Collar" is in the ancient district of the court
laundresses. "St. Nicholas in the Bell-Ringers" is comprehensible; but
"St. Nicholas the Blockhead" is so called because in this quarter dwelt
the imperial hatmakers, who prepared "blockheads" for shaping their
wares. "St. Nicholas Louse's Misery" is, probably, a corruption of two
somewhat similar words meaning Muddy Hill. "St. Nicholas on Chickens'
Legs" belonged to the poulterers, and was so named because it was raised
from the ground on supports resembling stilts. "St. Nicholas of the
Interpreters" is in the quarter where the Court interpreters lived, and
where the Tatar mosque now stands. Then we have: "The Life-Giving
Trinity in the Mud," "St. John the Warrior" and "St. John the Theologian
in the Armory," "The Birth of Christ on Broadswords," "St. George the
Martyr in the Old Jails," "The Nine Holy Martyrs on Cabbage-Stalks," on
the site of a former market garden, and the inexplicable "Church of the
Resurrection on the Marmot," besides many others, some of which, I was
told, bear quite unrepeatable names, probably perverted, like the last
and like "St. Nicholas Louse's Misery," from words having originally
some slight resemblance in sound, but which are now unrecognizable.

Great stress is laid, in hasty books of travel, on the contrasts
presented by the Moscow streets, the "palace of a prince standing by the
side of the squalid log hut of a peasant," and so forth. That may,
perhaps, have been true of the Moscow of twenty or thirty years ago. In
very few quarters is there even a semblance of truth in that description
at the present day. The clusters of Irish hovels in upper New York among