mself in our behalf, procured us a
room with a lovely prospect, transferred his bouquet of lilacs and
peonies to our table, and produced his bottle of lemon-syrup to flavor
our tea. The rules of the monastery are very strict, and no visitor is
exempt from their observance. Not a fish can be caught, not a bird or
beast shot, no wine or liquor of any kind, nor tobacco in any form, used
on the island. Rigid as the organization seems, it bears equally on
every member of the brotherhood: the equality upon which such
associations were originally based is here preserved. The monks are only
in an ecclesiastical sense subordinate to the abbot. Otherwise, the
fraternity seems to be about as complete as in the early days of
Christianity.

The Valamo, and her rival, the Letuchie, had advertised a trip to the
Holy Island, the easternmost of the Valaam group, some six miles from
the monastery, and the weather was so fair that both boats were crowded,
many of the monks accompanying us. Our new-found friend was also of the
party, and I made the acquaintance of a Finnish student from the Lyceum
at Kuopio, who gave me descriptions of the Saima Lake and the wilds of
Savolax. Running eastward along the headlands, we passed Chernoi Noss,
(Black-Nose,) the name of which again recalled a term common in the
Orkneys and Shetlands,--_noss_, there, signifying a headland. The Holy
Island rose before us,--a circular pile of rock, crowned with wood, like
a huge, unfinished tower of Cyclopean masonry, built up out of the deep
water. Far beyond it, over the rim of the lake, glimmered the blue
eastern shore. As we drew near, we found that the tumbled fragments of
rock had been arranged, with great labor, to form a capacious foot-path
around the base of the island. The steamers drew up against this narrow
quay, upon which we landed, under a granite wall which rose
perpendicularly to the height of seventy or eighty feet. The firs on the
summit grew out to the very edge and stretched their dark arms over us.
Every cranny of the rock was filled with tufts of white and pink
flowers, and the moisture, trickling from above, betrayed itself in long
lines of moss and fern.

I followed the pilgrims around to the sunny side of the island, and
found a wooden staircase at a point where the wall was somewhat broken
away. Reaching the top of the first ascent, the sweet breath of a spring
woodland breathed around me. I looked under the broken roofage of the
boughs u