Tsarol Baubles

Seasoned correspondents who had viewed the crown jewels of the Romanovs with mild amaze cabled that they were "dazzled" last week when the Soviet Government finally placed on display the fabulous toys and baubles of the Tsars.

In a square whitewashed room, brooded over by a death-white plaster bust of Lenin, the toys were laid out on a long table covered with black velvet. Guards stood about, their uniforms utterly without pockets and buttoned tightly at the knees and wrists. As the correspondents filed in, a train 18 inches long was whirring around the table.

The five cars duplicate exactly those on which the last of the Tsars crossed the Trans-Siberian railway. One car contains a chapel, the altar ablaze with a jeweled service. The salon car of the Tsar is complete with bath, lounge and dining-room. A locomotive propelled by clockwork draws the whole.

Though the value of such a work of skill would be fabulous, no matter of what it was made, the fact that the cars are of pure gold and the engine of platinum is not insignificant.

Other marvels: 1) the "stickpin watch" of Nicholas II, thin as a dime and half its diameter, varying not one minute in a month; 2) a jeweled "orange tree," eight inches high, the leaves of emeralds, with ruby fruits, diamond flowers, the whole opening at the pressure of a button to display an enameled nightingale, singing and flapping its wings; 3) the plain gold and ivory rattle, ordered by sensible Catherine the Great for her children; 4) a gold stage-coach four inches long and an inch and a half high with a 20-carat diamond* cut like a lantern swinging within; 5) the Queen Victoria paper weight, displaying that sovereign carved dumpily in jade, wearing a diamond crown.

*An ordinary "engagement diamond" weighs about half a carat.