lately introduced into the skein; the same when
any favourite whatever has to undergo snubbing
by a rival, and a smashed nose in
consequence.

A TARTAR MOSQUE.

EVERY week of my stay at Moscow I had been
resolving to go to the Friday morning service
at the Tartar mosque. At last I one day
determined to increase no longer the pavement
of a place below me by any further fruitless good
resolutions, so summoned my irritable, idle, and
grumbling valet de place to my heel—much as
an angry man does his runagate pointer on a
September morning, when the bright keen air
is all alive with partridges—and sallied off, across
the stone bridge below the Kremlin, to that quiet
suburb of the Holy City, wherein, I had been
informed, stood a small Tartar mosque, where
a small migratory congregation of Moslems
worshipped every Friday.

Herr Schlafrig, my German valet de place aforesaid,
who was vexed at my sudden promptitude,
and at the prospect of a long and dusty walk,
sulkily informed me, with the torpid dulness of a
much-bored man, that there were about a hundred
and thirty Tartars living in Moscow, and some
forty Persians. The former were all true
believers of the Koran and the Mahomedan
traditions, the rest Shiites or heretical followers of
Ali. The mosque belonged to the orthodox
men; as for the heretics, they performed their
devotions privately in the house of a
merchant of their own sect. All these Tartars and
Persian exiles were either coachmen, or sellers in
the bazaars of dressing-gowns of Bokharian silk.
In St. Petersburg, where Tartars were less
numerous, the true believers met for weekly prayer
in the house of an orthodox merchant. The great
mosques were, however, in the Crimea and at
Kasam.

Moscow, the city of churches, never seemed
to me so beautiful and so picturesque as it did
that fine September morning. We had passed
down the street of the Smith's Bridge—the
Regent-street of Moscow—famous for its
jewellers' shops, confectioners, and music-sellers;
and, passing through an embattled gate that
pierced a long line of white rampart, had reached
the great dusty square that girdles round the
strange towers and Chinese-looking battlements
of the Kremlin enclosure. Before us
was that pagoda-like pile of striped and coloured
spires and domes, reared by Ivan the Terrible
to show the fantastic prodigality of his architectural
imagination, and of which that crowned
brute is said to have been so proud that he put
out the eyes of the Italian who built it, lest he
should erect any rival temple that might surpass
it. There it was, with its green and golden turbans
of cupolas, and its bulbous spires, crowned with
rough blossoms of iron thistles, that shone in the
royal sunshine. On one side of us was the Holy
Gate of the Kremlin, through which even the
emperor may not pass without doffed hat. The
dusky sacred picture and the eternal lamp above
the portal, that even the flames which drove
Napoleon from his prey, could not deface. Now,
we are lower down, and on the bridge. Below
us rippled the shallow fretting stream. Those
great hampers in the water were fish
preserves. Above us, on the opposite bank, rose
the Kremlin towers—half Indian, half Chinese
in character—unaltered since the clouds of
Tartars howled at the sight of them. That great
gilt roofed tower was the Tower of Ivan Veleki.
Those gilded domes, clustering together, were the
roofs of the sacred churches—St. Michael the
Archangel, the Uspenski-Sabor, and their
companions. Great clouds of dust rose as there came
racing over the bridge, flocks of telegas and
country carts, mere long narrow cradles, mounted
on rude wheels; in those cradles, lined with hay,
sat country women in sheepskin coats, and with
coloured handkerchiefs bound round their heads,
good-natured stupid-looking creatures, bound
to Moscow to sell birch-wood, or to do shopping
on the humblest scale. After them trotted by, a
lancer with a red and yellow pennon fluttering
from the lance at his elbow, an open carriage full
of German tourists, or a crowd of shock-headed
burly peasants, already half drunk, clumsy and
noisy, but still abject and civil, to all they met.
Now, the bridge left behind us, and the Kremlin
hidden by houses, we plunged into the
suburbs. No dreary stucco palaces now, no
gymnasium, no academy for cadets, no
barrack: only quiet soft unpaved roads, bordered
by small houses and gardens, the walls generally
of plank, not always painted. One of the longest
and prettiest of all the streets was Tartar-street.
But it revealed so little sign of a mosque, that
Schlafrig had 'to inquire (with a contemptuous
look at me for proposing such an expedition) of
a soldier, where it was. All at once we came to
a green garden door, which Schlafrig pushed open
contemptuously, and we found ourselves in a
grassy court-yard, at one end of which stood a
single-storied house, with a cumbrous ladder resting
against the front wall, and steps leading
to a side entrance. The roof of the building
was formed, like other Russian roofs, of
large plates of iron painted a dark chocolate red.
It wanted by my watch five minutes to twelve.
Now, I was sorry we were so late, because I knew
that at half-past eleven on Fridays—the day on
which the Moslems hold that Adam was created
and died, and the day on which the general
resurrection is to take place—the blind mueddin, or
caller to prayer, would have ascended by that big
ladder to that red roof, and have chanted the
following supplication to the prophet:

"Blessing and peace be on thee, O thou of
great dignity! O, apostle of God! Blessing
and peace be on thee; to whom the Truth
said, I am God; blessing and peace be on thee,
thou first of the creatures of God, and seal of
the apostles of God! From me be peace on