of Russian drosky drivers. The cathedral,
our goal, was snowy-white, with frescoes on the outer walls,
onion-shaped domes of bronze turned green; or gold, or blue with stars
of gold.

We entered and found the body of the church well filled by peasants,
women and men in sheepskin. One poor doe-eyed creature crouched to press
his forehead twenty times at least on the stone floor of the church.
Eagerly, like a flock of sheep, they all pushed forward to where a
richly-robed priest held a cross of gold for each to kiss, taking their
proffered kopeks.

The setting sun streamed through the ancient stained glass, dyeing their
dirty sheepskin crimson, and purple, and green, until they looked like
illuminations in old missals. To the eye and the mind of western Europe
it was all incomprehensible. Yet those were the people of Russia who are
to-day her mass of armed defenders; the element that has been counted on
from the first by Russia and her allies stood penniless before an altar
laid over with gold and silver and precious stones. Just before we got
to Kiev, one of those men in sheepskins with uncut hair and dogged
expression, who had a sense of values in human existence, broke into
the church and stole jeweled chalices from the altar. They were traced
to a pawnshop in a distant city and brought back. It was a common thing
to see men halt in the street and stand uncovered, while a pitiful
funeral cortege passed. A wooly, half-starved, often lame horse, was
harnessed with rope to a simple four-wheeled farm wagon, a long-haired
peasant at his head, women and children holding to the sides of the cart
as they stumbled along in grief, and inside a rough wooden coffin
covered with a black pall, on which was sewn the Greek cross, in white.
Heartless, hopeless, weary and underfed, those peasants were taking
their dead to be blessed for a price, by the priest in cloth of gold,
without whose blessing there could be no burial.

CHAPTER XXIII

MARK TWAIN'S LOVE OF COLOUR IN ALL COSTUMING

The public thinks of Mark Twain as being the apostle of _white_ during
the last years of his life, but those who knew him well recall his
delightfully original way of expressing an intense love for _bright
colours_. This brings to mind a week-end at Mark Twain's beautiful
Italian villa in Reading, Connecticut, when, one night during dinner, he
held forth on the compelling fascination of colours and the American
Indian's superior judgment in