ad of for the Czar.

In our White Alberta much antipathy exists between the Orthodox Greek
Church and the Uniats, and several years ago they had a lawsuit which
they took to the Privy Council in England, and which drove to insanity
one of our cleverest barristers. They are bonny fighters, these
Ruthenians from Galicia, and if they cannot "have the law" on one
another, they may always have the consolation of fisticuffs. And what,
pray, are muscles hard for and skulls thick, except to fight? Riddle
me that!

Presently, when we shall have tied down and diverted their tremendous
fighting energy into what is usually described as civilization, we
shall, of a surety, find a human voltage here which will send these
Slavic peasants high up the scale where well-conceived and successful
endeavour is weighed and appraised. At present, ah, well! they are
young and positive and he is the best man who survives.

The little sister brings me back into the church, where she places a
chair for me close beside the altar facing the congregation, an act and
fact which cause me not a little amazement and considerable
trepidation. Will the priest permit an unhallowed woman of lean and
meagre accomplishments--and she a Protestant--to sit so close to the
holy of holies? Will he?

He does not even appear to see me and swings the censor close, close to
my head, over and over again, with the same free-handed gesture of
Millet's sower. He swings it out and about, hither and yon, till all
my garments smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia; until, like Solomon's
spouse, my hands dropped myrrh.

Sometimes it is a rude Slavic peasant who swings the censer or lays the
spice on the live coals--a rough-necked man with red-brown hands and
face. He wears a caftan, or long cloak of skin, upon which red leather
is cunningly appliqued in pleasing designs. I doubt not he is from
Bukowina, or "the beech-woods," for the women of that province are
skilled craftswomen. He swings the censer with such deftness, that
were I not benumbed by the languourous odour of the smoke-thick air, I
would be wondering how this queer shock-headed acolyte with his bovine
stolidity came to acquire the revolver wrist in such a high state of
development. Surely it is well I am stupefied, for it might be
irreverent so to wonder.

But for that matter, all this service belongs to the people and not to
any stilted crucifers or superior choristers smacking of professional
pie