ment, unless conscience
interferes; and people who had stayed there told me that meat had been
served to them from the monastery kitchen; so that puzzle still remains
a puzzle to me.

We went to see the brethren dine in the refectory, an ancient, vaulted
building of stone, near the cathedral. Under a white stone slab near the
entrance lie the bodies of Kotchubey and Iskra, who were unjustly
executed by Peter the Great for their loyal denunciation of Mazeppa's
meditated treachery. Within, the walls of the antechamber were decorated
with dizzy perspective views of Jerusalem, the saints, and pious elders
of the monastery. At the end of the long dining-hall, beyond an
_ikonostas_, was a church, as is customary in these refectories. Judging
from the number of servitors whom we had met hurrying towards the cells
with sets of porcelain dinner-trays, not many monks intended to join the
common table, and it did not chance to be one of the four days in the
year when the Metropolitan of Kieff and other dignitaries dine there in
full vestments.

At last, a score of monks entered, chanted a prayer at a signal from a
small bell, and seated themselves on benches affixed to the wall which
ran round three sides of the room. The napkins on the tables which stood
before the benches consisted of long towels, each of which lay across
four or five of the pewter platters from which they ate, as the table
was set in preparation. If it had been a festal day, there would have
been several courses, with beer, mead, and even wine to wash them down.
As it was, the monks ate their black bread and boiled buckwheat groats,
served in huge dishes, with their wooden spoons, and drank _kvas_,
brewed from sour black bread, at a signal from the bell, after the first
dish only, as the rule requires. While they ate, a monk, stationed at a
desk near by, read aloud the extracts from the Lives of the Saints
appointed for the day. This was one of the "sights," but we found it
curious and melancholy to see strong, healthy men turned into monks and
content with that meagre fare. Frugality and dominion over the flesh are
good, of course, but minds from west of the Atlantic Ocean never seem
quite to get into sympathy with the monastic idea; and we always felt,
when we met monks, as though they ought all to be off at work somewhere,
--I will not say "earning money," for they do that as it is in such
great monasteries as that of Kieff, but lightening the burden of the