lamp flickering before it."

"The foreigner, who was a few minutes before on the German side of the
frontier and stands on Russian soil for the first time, looks at the
shrine with curiosity. Porters are hurrying in with luggage, and
travellers are chattering in half a dozen languages. An official at a
desk in the middle of the great hall is examining passports. A man is
protesting that he did not know that playing-cards were contraband; a
woman is radiant, for the dirty lining she has sewn in a new Paris hat
has deceived the inquisitors. Everybody is in a hurry to be through with
the business, and free to lunch in the adjoining restaurant before going
on to St. Petersburg. It is a strange home for the majestic Virgin of
the Byzantine picture.

"Here, at the threshold of the empire, Russia placards--S. Paul's vivid
Greek gives me the word--her faith before the eyes of all comers. In the
bustle of a custom-house, charged with fretfulness and impatience and
meanness, Russia sets forth her belief in a life beyond the grave and
her conviction that the ideals presented by the picture are the noblest
known to mankind."

Nowhere as in Russia is one reminded so constantly, in what we should
consider most unlikely places, that we are in a Christian country. In
the streets and at railway stations, in baths, hotels, post offices,
shops, and warehouses, in the different rooms of factories and
workshops, in private houses, rich and poor alike, in government houses,
and even in places of evil resort which I will not specify, as well as
in prisons, indeed in _every_ public place there is the _ikon_--most
frequently representing the Holy Mother and Child--and its lamp burning
before it.

In later chapters I will write more at length upon religion and worship,
but I must give the reader _at once_, if a stranger to Russia, something
of the impression which the ubiquity of the _ikon_ makes upon those who
go there for the first time. It is _always_ to be seen. And though I
will try and describe what it directly represents in the shape of Church
life later, yet from the very first I must write, as it were, with the
_ikon_ before me. I must see with my mind's eye the Holy Mother clasping
the Divine Child to her bosom, with a few flowers and a twinkling little
light before them, all the time I write, whether it is of things secular
or sacred, grave or gay, national or international, or I shall give out
but little of the spirit which I fe