The drives in the parks are beautiful. Therein is a lovely palace where lived the Princess Dagmar before she became empress. The armory here forms a museum of wonderful interest, for it has gifts of untold value from Spain to Persia and beyond. Every kind of gun, sword, and dagger is here; and those from the conquered sheiks and khans of Asia shine resplendent in jewels by the mass. The saddle-cloths from the Orient, and especially the presents from the Shah of Persia, are the richest known to any collection in the world. Among the manifold things here to be seen are the lock and key found near the site of the temple of Jerusalem; the jewelry of the harem of the Khan of Khiva,--a wonderful collection for female adornment; Chevalier Bayard's cuirass; a spear which opens after it enters the body; an alarm clock which shoots off a gun to awaken the sleeper; the flags taken in the Hungarian insurrection of 1849; the baton of Schamyl, the Circassian chief, who fought Russia so many years; the emeralds, by the quantity, which the Shah of Persia sent to the Czar; the "horse furniture" of the Indian sheiks, and a circular knife which they used to hurl, which cut your head off before you could say your little prayer; and as a proper apex to this collection of curious gifts and gems, worth alone sixty millions of rubles, the sword of Mazeppa, the brave hetman of the Poles, who will never cease to ride through histrionic and historic dangers on that fierce untamed charger of the desert!...
If you would find in full perfection the richest in all respects of all the palaces in the world, I suppose the Winter Palace would be that superlative edifice. Since the attempt to blow it up as the royal people were about to dine it has been closed. I made an effort, through Colonel Hoffman, our chargé d'affaires, to obtain an entrance for the Americans now stopping here, but vainly. Recent events forbade. The Czar himself will not go into it again. It is shut for two years. This was a disappointment, but it was partly compensated for by admission to the "Hermitage," which is a part or a neighbor to the Winter Palace. But the Hermitage seems to be enough for all our time.
All the "masters," old and young, native and foreign, are in profusion here, as well as specimens of the exhaustless mineral glories of Russia and Siberia in every form of carved beauty and tasteful grace. Museums of ancient statuary, coins, jewels, and intaglios, illustrating every age and phase of history, and, as a climax of interest, the relics of the city of Kertch and other palaces in the Greek colonies of two thousand years ago,--now in southern Russia,--are here. This exhibition supplements General Cesnola's Cyprian antiquities, and would add fresh interest to our home museum. Upon these Greek relics are found such dresses, worn by the ancient Scythians, as our drosky-drivers now wear, and bas-reliefs on these old vases show horses managed exactly as my former Ohio constituent, Rarey, used to quell the worst "Cruisers" of the equestrian world.