Fish is fivepence a pound. It costs our washerwoman eighty kopecks to provide her food in fast time, instead of forty, which are enough at other times; and of this she complains. Also it is inconvenient that our Russian servants during the fasts will not consume the meat left by the English and American lodgers. And they are not content with potatoes, but must have soup made with oil and fish (though in the great Lent they do not eat fish). During the fasts the lower class "live chiefly on black rye-bread (which is moist and viscid, and slightly acid) and shtochi, a kind of soup made of red cabbages salted." One of their four Lents, which they are keeping now, is the first part of this month of August, from the 1st to the 14th (the eve of the Assumption) inclusively. It is called the Fast of our Lady (of the Mother of God). The other three Lents are the Fast of the Nativity, consisting of forty days before Christmas (beginning from the 15th of November), the Great Lent (the preparation for which begins from the Sunday before Septuagesima), and the Fast of the Apostles, which is of variable length, according as Pentecost falls earlier or later, beginning with the Monday after the Sunday of All Saints, called by us Trinity Sunday, or the first

2 [A rouble is worth 100 kopecks; that is, (the rouble's value in English money being about 3s. 2d.) a kopeck is not quite two-fifths of a penny.]

Sunday after Pentecost, and ending with the 28th of June, the eve of the Feast of the Apostles. The great mass of Russians, they say, perform their devotions, and communicate only once a year, commonly in the first or last week, or else in some other week of the Great Lent; and all public servants, both soldiers and civilians, are allowed-some one week, during which they attend all the services three times a day-to perform their devotions (the Russian word is goviết). Το confess and to communicate once a year is required ; but some of the more pious will communicate, as many as four times, once in each of the four Fasts. And this is, in fact, recommended by their Church. The old people are very strict in observing the weekly fasts on Wednesday and Friday. On some days Miss D. says they eat nothing at all till six o'clock p.m.

A

CHAPTER X.

Table and other talk.

UGUST 9 [o.s.].—I saw Mr. Blackmore, chaplain

of the English Russia Company at Cronstadt, for the first time. As I was going to the police office and the alien office with the clerk of the English Church, he observed that this is a country in which foreigners need recommendation and protection; and, on my replying that I had a letter to Count Pratasoff, the Ober-Procuror of the Synod, he said, "O then, sir, you are quite at the top of the tree, for he is the man that governs the Church." I said, "I fear the Russians may rather object to me, that we English have let our kings and Parliaments alter our Church and religion as they pleased." "I dare say, sir," he replied; "but it is a very different thing here. Here there is no mistake about it." At tea, at my lodging-house, Mr. T. said, that not long ago he saw some prisoners going off to Siberia for heresy. They had attempted to start some invention or reformation in religion. He

talked of our having protested against the Roman Catholic Church, and having embraced the Protestant religion; "but," he observed, "I can't abide a Dissenter, because I pray in church against heresy and schism. Speaking of Confession, he said, "I, for one, never could submit to that; and, as to fasting, I should like to know where that is directed in the English Prayer-book!" There are two English churches here, that of the Factory at Cronstadt, and another in Petersburg, called Sarepta, for English and American Independents, established originally by Dr. Pinkerton, agent of the Bible Society. Mr. Blackmore, and Mr. Law, are their respective chaplains. The English who die here are buried in the cemetery of the Lutherans. A month or two later

a Russian lady told me that her aunt had written to her from Moscow that she had heard of me from some one there, who said that I had scandalized some of the English at Petersburg by making the sign of the cross, seen perhaps at some Russian dinner-table; but there is a clergyman here, in some other respects a very strong Protestant, who said he found no fault at all with that; he thought it quite harmless and edifying: "in fact," he added, "I often make the sign of the cross myself, but 'secretly' under my surplice, for fear of the Jews.""

A Russian nobleman having asked his banker, a

Scotchman, some question about me, the reply was, "Oh, he is not of our Church; he is a member of some new sect;" and the same nobleman having said something to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Count Nesselrode, and as if the Anglican Church differed from the Lutherans and Calvinists, and was nearer to the Russian, Count Nesselrode answered, "The Anglican Church is just like the rest, simply Protestant and heretical. I must know, for I am an Anglican myself." (In fact he was so; and he communicated in the English Church every Easter.) But our Ambassador, Lord Clanricarde, answered somewhat differently. He said, "If you examine our formularies and the writings of some of our former bishops and divines, you may find in them much to justify such a representation of the Anglican Church. But if you go into our churches, you will see nothing at all of that kind. In fact, they have made all so bare and mean that religion has become contemptible to people of the higher classes."

August 10 [o.s.].-Went out in the evening and looked into the neighbouring Church of St. Nicholas Morskoi (i.e. of the sea or the sailors). It has a belltower at its west end, standing apart; not inelegant, though rather pagoda-like, with its roofs showing separate stages at intervals, coloured of a lighter green than its five cupolas. The whole is surrounded by a