Any one who watches the outward
religious practices of the Russians will be apt
to consider them to be candle, if not
fire-worshippers; so intimately are devotion and
candle-grease mingled in their visible
worship; but be it as it may, the glory-headed
candles strike me as being so purely Byzantine,
that I cannot refrain from recommending
them to the notice of the Pre-Raphaelite
brotherhood. I should very much like to see
Mr. Dante Rosetti's notion of a dark lantern
in that state of ornamentation. Whether
the Russians eat candles or not, is still a
moot point; but it is certain that vast numbers
of the priests live upon candles. The
subvention allowed them by the government
is so miserably small, that but from the
revenue they derive from the sale of votive
candles, many of them must inevitably
starve.

Saving these four pictures, and the saint's
image, which last is the precious jewel in
the head of this toad-like place, there is no
other evidence of attempts to sacrifice to the
graces, in the Starosta's house. Every other
article of furniture is of the commonest,
coarsest, rudest, wigwamiest description. The
rotten door swings on leathern hinges, or
strips of raw hide rather, like that of the
watch tower. There is a table formed of two
long fir-planks resting upon massive tressels.
There is a scanty square of dirty leather on
it, which I presume serves as table-cloth,
and on which our samovar now rests. This
tressel table has a most hideous resemblance
to the high bench platform you see in a parish
deadhouse; and I am horrified by the
coincidence, when Alexis tells me that when a
man dies in these parts his corpse is laid on
the table to be howled over, and that to say
that '' Ivan is on the table " is synonymous,
in popular parlance, with saying that Ivan is
dead. I want to be off from the Starosta's
house immediately after this; but, Alexis
(who is the laziest young cub between here
and Npookhopersk), won't hear of it, and
says that the horses haven't had half enough
rest yet; so I continue my inventory. All
round the BalschoÏ-Isba there runs a low
wide bench, contrived a double debt to pay;
for the surplus members of the family, for
whom there is no room in the family-vault
bed, lounge on the bench by day, and sleep
on it by night. I wish I knew what there
was in the churchwarden's pew behind the
partition. More beds? Alexis thinks not.
The Starosta's riches, perhaps. Will Alexis
ask? Alexis asks, or says that he does, and
listens to a voluble explanation on the part
of the Starosta, with a desperate attempt at
an expression of wisdom in his large face;
but, wheii I ask him for a translation, he says
it doesn't matter; and I have a worse opinion
of his Russ than ever.

Alexis is sitting in a malformed Chinese
puzzle on a large scale of timber once painted
green, and which was once, to the Starosta's
great pride, a garden chair belonging to the
absentee, M. de Katorichassoff. I, with my
usual selfishness and disregard for the feelings
of others (I have the best teacup, too), have
usurped an old, long, low, dormeuse fauteuil
of grey Utrecht velvet (the dearly-beloved
furniture covering of the Russians—Vloursky
they call it, par excellence), which from age
and maltreatment resembles in its black and
tawny bundlings nothing half so much as the
skin of an incorrigible old Tom, who has had
rather a bad night of it on the tiles. Still, if
the old chair had four legs instead of three,
it would be a very comfortable old chair
There are no other chairs, no other seats, save
the bench, and that offered—if it be not too
sacred a thing to sit down upon—by that
vast chest of wood painted black, in the
corner.

This chest has a formidable iron hasp, and
a padlock almost as big as a knocker, and is
further braced with iron bands. It is also
screwed to the floor, I have no doubt. It is
the sort of chest that Sindbad the sailor
might have taken with him on his voyages,
or that the piratical merman in Washington
Irving's delightful Knickerbockeriana might
have floated away on in the storm. It is a
chest that I should like to fill with dollars,
and sprawl at full length upon till death
came for change for a three-score-and-ten
pound note. It is such a chest as might
have served for the pièce de resistance in the
Mistletoe Bough tragedy—if this were a
baron's hall instead of a Russian Moujik's
hut, and if a Russian baron's retainers
were ever blithe and gay, or kept Christmas
holiday.

I suppose that in this chest the Starosta
keeps his discharge from the army—he
served fifty years since, and was at the
Borodino—which he cannot read, but whose
big black eagle he is never tired of admiring.
Likewise, the Sonnik, or Russian Interpreter
of Dreams, coarsely printed at Kieff
on grey paper, and illustrated with glaring
daubs, whose letter-press is likewise Chaldee
to him, but which he causes one of his son's
wives who can read (she was a lady's-maid
once) to spell over to him occasionally. The
interpretations do not stand him in very
valuable stead, certainly, for he has generally
forgotten the dreams themselves before he
has vicarious recourse to the dream-book.
Laid up within the recesses of this monstrous
chest, not in lavender, but in a blue cotton
pocket-handkerchief well impregnated with
mahorka, is the Starosta's blue cloth caftan
of state—a robe only worn on the most
solemn and jubilatory occasions, such as one
of the angel's visits (so few and far between
are they) of the lord of the manor to his
lands, or the great ecclesiastical fêtes of the
egg-eating Easter, and the peppermint brandy
moistened Assumption. This caftan is an
ample robe, possibly of genuine indigo-dyed
English broadcloth, which would be worth at