Lucy Harding by Mary Jane Holmes

We had been told that the time to visit St. Petersburg was in the winter, when the city is in its glory. The nobility have then returned from their summer homes. The czar is at his palace. The Nevsky Prospect is gay with equipages of every description, from the common sledge to the carriages of the aristocracy, while the Neva, frozen to the thickness of three or four feet, rivals the Nevsky, with its crowds of sledges and skates and lookers-on, its colored lights, its bazaars and booths filled with a laughing crowd till long after the coachmen and horses, who have stood for hours in the cold before the Winter Palace, where a ball was in progress, have gone home.

All this I saw later, and was a part of most of it during my second visit to St. Petersburg; but now, not knowing the difference, I was satisfied to be there in the summer, although the streets seemed deserted, and most of the great houses were closed, or left in charge of a few old domestics, who were faithful to their trust as watchdogs. The czar, with his family, was at Gatschina, in the great, gloomy palace, where I was told that, although there were six hundred rooms, the royal family confined themselves to only six, as they could thus feel more secure from attacks of nihilists. Whether this was true or not, I do not know. One hears many wonderful rumors in St. Petersburg of plots and counterplots, and prying gendarmes, and arrests and banishment to the fortress or Siberia; but these did not concern us. We were there to see, and we made good our time, going everywhere we could go, and pushing our way into some places which at first seemed impossible to enter.