A Hall In Tsars-Koe-Selo.

The Palace Of Peterhof.

One room in the palace of Peterhof is unique; for its walls are entirely paneled with female portraits, painted for Catharine II. by a favorite artist. It is rather bewildering to stand environed at one time by eight hundred and sixty-three pictures of beautiful young women. Yet there is no monotony in them. Each face as well as each attitude is different. One pretty girl is knitting busily; another peeps archly from behind a curtain; a third weeps; while still another buries herself to her ears in fur, leaving visible only a pair of rosy lips and dreamy eyes.

The fountains form the most remarkable feature of Peterhof. There seems to be no limit to their number and variety. One, for example, is called the " Mountain of Gold," because the water flows over a flight of gilded steps, which give it, when illuminated, the appearance of a cataract of molten gold. Nymphs, lions, river-gods, and heroes of mythology and history all figure in them, until the perspective is bewildering; while, not content with these, the architect designed long rows of single fountains, and pyramids of water, and even artificial trees, each leaf of which sends forth a silvery stream. The most astonishing, however.rep-resents Samson contending with a lion, from whose mouth a stream leaps forth to the height of eighty feet. Finally, the enormous flood of water from these various sources unites in one great volume, and rolls away like a wild mountain torrent toward the sea.

The Room Of Portraits.

The Hall Of Busts.

A fancy of the Tsar Nicholas was to make his pages and servants, at the beat of a drum, charge on these fountains, and, rushing furiously into their blinding streams, attempt to capture them like batteries, and turn off the water with their own hands. We may be tolerably sure, however, that Nicholas himself never led the charge.

The Fountains Of Peterhof.