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Suddenly all in Tichon’s life had changed! Petersburg, in its general aspect so unlike Moscow, had startled Tichon. For days he would wander about the streets looking in amazement at the endless canals, prospects, houses erected on piles, driven into the yielding mud of the marshes, all in a row, along a straight line, according to a law, which forbade any new building either to go beyond or fall short of the prescribed line, modest whitewashed huts amidst woods and waste lands, often roofed in the Finnish manner with turf and birch-bark, palaces of elaborate structure, after the Prussian fashion, melancholy garrison dépôts, ammunition stores, sheds, churches with Dutch spires, and striking clocks—everything was flat, ordinary, colourless, very much like a dream-vision. At times, on dull mornings, it seemed to him that the city, shrouded in a muddy yellow mist, would lift with the fog and vanish like a dream. In the legendary city that which is, remains invisible, while here in Petersburg on the contrary, the visible is that which is not; yet both cities were equally visionary. And again there arose within him that strange feeling, which he had not experienced for a long time—the presentiment of the end. Only it no longer resolved itself into ecstasy and fear, but oppressed him with a more definite anguish.