jected whenever we made pious pilgrimages to places of historic
renown. On each occasion of this sort we were moved to reflect deeply on
the proverbial blessings of ignorance. It makes a vast difference in
one's mental comfort, I find, whether he accepts the present
unquestioningly, with enthusiasm, and reconstructs the historic past as
an agreeable duty, or whether he already bears the past, in its various
aspects, in his mind, in involuntary but irrational expectation of
meeting it, and is forced to accept the present as a painful task! Which
of these courses to pursue in the future was the subject of my
disappointed meditations, as we drove through the too Europeanized
streets, and landed at a hotel of the same pattern. It is easy to
forgive St. Petersburg, in its giddy youth of one hundred and
seventy-five winters, for its Western features and comforts; but that
Kieff, in its venerable maturity of a thousand summers, should be so
spick and span with newness and reformation seemed at first utterly
unpardonable. The inhabitants think otherwise, no doubt, and deplore the
mediaeval hygienic conditions which render the town the most unhealthy
in Europe, in the matter of the death-rate from infectious diseases.

Our comfortable hotel possessed not a single characteristic feature,
except a line on the printed placard of regulations posted in each room.
The line said, "The price of this room is four rubles [or whatever it
was] a day, except in Contract Time." "Contract Time," I found, meant
the Annual Fair, in February, when the normal population of about one
hundred and sixty-six thousand is swelled by "arrivers"--as travelers
are commonly designated on the signboards of the lower-class hotels--
from all the country round about. When, prompted by this remarkable
warning, I inquired the prices during the fair, the clerk replied
sweetly,--no other word will do justice to his manner,--"All we can
get!" Such frankness is what the French call "brutal."

The principal street of the town, the Krestchatik, formerly the bed of a
stream, in front of our windows, was in the throes of sewer-building.
More civilization! Sewage from the higher land had lodged there in
temporary pools. The weather was very hot. The fine large yellow bricks,
furnished by the local clay-beds, of which the buildings and sidewalks
were made, were dazzling with heat. It is only when one leaves the
low-lying new town, and ascends the hills, on which the old dw