THE AMERICAN NEWS COMPANY
PUBLISHERS’ AGENTS
NEW YORK
Copyright, 1905
By Mary J. Holmes
Lucy Harding
LUCY HARDING.
CHAPTER I.
NICOL PATOFF.
In the summer of 189– I was one of a party of tourists who were going to St. Petersburg. There were eight of us, all women, strong, fearless and self-reliant, and all natives of Massachusetts. Two were from Boston, three from its suburbs, and three, including myself, from Ridgefield, a pretty little inland town among the Worcester hills. We had a guide, of course, Henri Smeltz, a German, and if his credentials, which I now think he wrote himself, were to be believed, he was fully competent to take charge of eight women with opinions of their own and as much knowledge of the country they were to visit as he had. It had been the dream of my life to see the water-soaked city, and when the opportunity came I accepted it eagerly, with, however, some dread of the fatigue of the long journey and the annoyances I might meet in the capital of the czar. I was not a good sailor and I had a great dislike for train travel, and by the time we had crossed the Atlantic and the Continent and were on the Gulf of Finland, I was in a rather limp and collapsed condition. But I rallied as the bright July day wore on, and when the Russian officers came on board I was quite myself and felt able to cope with them all if necessary. I had nothing to fear. I was an American citizen and wore the colors of my country in a knot of ribbon on my dress. My passport was all right, so far as I knew. But better than this was the fact that I could speak Russian with a tolerable degree of accuracy. I was fond of languages, and during my school days had mastered German and French to the extent of reading and writing them fluently. My teacher was Nicol Patoff from St. Petersburg, who, outside of his school hours, had a class in Russian which I joined, and astonished both Nicol and myself by the readiness with which I acquired the difficult language which the most of my companions gave up in despair after a few weeks’ trial and in spite of the entreaties of Nicol, who assured them that with a little patience what seemed so hard would be very easy.