During the time between the Day of St. Nicholas and Christmas it seems as if half Russia streams out upon the ice of the river Neva in St. Petersburg. All through the summer the boats come and go, bringing food, fuel, building materials, everything the city needs, from the interior; but the river is frozen for six months of the year, and in those months it is used as if it were public land. St. Petersburg is a very gay capital in winter, when the wealthier Russian nobles have left their country estates, and come down to exchange visits, to give balls, or go dashing about in gay sleighs to join the sleighing or skating contests for which a part of the frozen river is reserved. All around the cleared spaces on the ice, merchants have set up temporary booths; here you may buy tea and nutcakes; there holy pictures, or ikons, pictures of all the possible saints, some costing a few pennies, others with gold and silver backgrounds costing many roubles, a rouble being worth about fifty cents. On another part of the river a great provision market is held a little before Christmas, and the booths stretch for miles. Everything is frozen. Countless oxen, piles of sheep and goats, pyramids of pigs, form a frozen range of hillocks to which the butcher comes to make his choice. With hatchet or saw he divides the animal, ox, or pig, or it may be a bear, into sections which his customers store in the ice-cellars which have all been freshly filled. Thousands of workmen are engaged during the winter in cutting and drawing the ice from yet another part of the Neva, and on a still frosty morning the clink of their axes against iron ice-breakers can be heard at a long distance from the river.