The little palace erected by the Emperor Nicholas has some valuable paintings and a good library. Here is also another bedroom more wonderful than that just described. The former Emperor slept on straw covered with leather, but it was loosely stuffed; the mattress of the Emperor Nicholas, on which he lay is stuffed so that a shutter in its absence would prove no great inconvenience. It is difficult to say how many churches there are in Moscow, the several accounts differ so widely. Some speak of 1,500, others 500; the former number must include public and private chapels, and those in convents, but the holiest of them all are three in the Kremlin. Though not extensive, they are crowded with pictures and shrines, the heavy pillars that support the fine cupolas are covered with gold from top to bottom, and the walls the same with large fresco paintings, darkened by age. Here is Mount Sinai, and a golden Moses of pure gold, with a golden table of the law, and also a golden coffer to contain the Host, said to weigh 120,000 ducats. A Bible, the gift of the mother of Peter the Great, the cover so laden with gold and jewels that it requires two men to carry it into the church; it is said to weigh 120 lbs. The emeralds on the cover are an inch long, and the whole binding cost 1,200,000 roubles, or L200,000 sterling. In the house of the Holy Synod are thirty silver vessels containing the holy oil used in baptising all the children in Russia. It is made of the finest Florence oil, mingled with a number of essences, about three or four gallons serving all Russia for one and a half or two years. Here one of our fellow travellers, impelled by that curiosity common to the sex, dipped her finger into one of the holy jars and forthwith anointed herself, bidding me to do the same; and, thus tempted, I followed her example and also tried its efficacy upon my other half, without finding, I must confess, any material change. I have since thought that such antics, though not done in derision, might have proved serious and led to our detention and perhaps final removal to a distant part of the empire. In the church of St. Michael the Archangel are the tombs of the Russian sovereigns, which are raised sepulchres, mostly of brick, in the shape of a coffin and about two feet high. In addition to the churches and palaces there is in the Kremlin an immense pile of buildings called the Senate.