aders about the life of a country in
which I have not, as yet, spent a great many years.

It _is_ a great country, as all we who know it feel, and "It doth not
yet appear what it shall be." If some of us are right in thinking of the
Russians as a great race with a vast country of tremendous resources;
who can in any way picture the great and wonderful possibilities of
their future? It will be my task to try and show how little opportunity
they have had as yet of getting their share of modern civilization, how
imperfectly, as yet, the ethical side of their religion has been
imparted to them; and still, in spite of all this and of other defects
of their social and religious life, how much they have accomplished in
the way of real achievement.

I fail to see how any one can help feeling the greatest
interest--hopeful and expectant--about their future, or feel anything
else but the great thankfulness that I feel myself, that we and they as
peoples have been brought so intimately together by circumstances which
few could have foreseen only a very few years ago, but which have come
about not only, as some would say, in the course of Providence, but in a
very true sense, as I trust our and their national histories shall show
in time to come, "According to the good hand of our GOD upon us."

[Illustration: _The Kremlin._]

CHAPTER II

GENERAL SOCIAL LIFE

The whole life of the Russian people reminds those who visit them
continually and in every possible way that they are in a religious
country; for everywhere there is the _ikon_, or sacred religious
picture. There are other ways, especially the columns of the newspapers
full of notices of private and public ministrations and pathetic
requests for prayers for the departed, of bringing religion continually
before the public mind, but the _ikon_ is most in evidence. It is a
picture in one sense, for it is a representation either of our LORD or
of the Holy Virgin or of some well-known saint; but the garments are in
relief, often composed of one of the precious metals and ornamented in
some cases with jewels; and thus it is quite different from other sacred
pictures. It is the first characteristic evidence of "Russia" to meet
one's eyes on entering, and the last to be seen as one leaves, any
public place.

"A great picture of the Virgin and Child hangs in the custom-house at
Wirballen," writes Mr. Rothay Reynolds at the beginning of _My Russian
Year_, "with a little