“I think I saw a Russian gentleman at St. Isaac’s touch his forehead to the floor, rise and stand erect, touch the floor again, and rise again, ten times in as many minutes; and we were one day forbidden entrance to a church because the czar was about to say his prayers; we found he was making the pilgrimage of some seventy churches, and praying in each one.

“Christians who believe in public prayer, and who claim that we should be instant in prayer, would consider it a severe tax upon their energies to pray seventy times a day—­they don’t care to do it!

“Then there is the democracy of the church.  There are no pews to be sold to the highest bidder—­no ‘reserved seats;’ the oneness and equality before God are always recognized.  A Russian gentleman, as he prays, does not look around, and move away from the poor beggar next to him.  At St. Peter’s the crowd stands or kneels—­at St. Isaac’s they stand; and they stand literally on the same plane.

“I noticed in the crowd at St. Isaac’s, one festival day, young girls who were having a friendly chat; but their religion was ever in their thoughts, and they crossed themselves certainly once a minute.  Their religion is not an affair of Sunday, but of every day in the week.

“The drosky-driver, certainly the most stupid class of my acquaintance in Russia, never forgets his prayers; if his passenger is never so much in a hurry, and the bribe never so high, the drosky-driver will check his horse, and make the sign of the cross as he passes the little image of the Virgin,—­so small, perhaps, that you have not noticed it until you wonder why he slackens his pace.

“Then as to government.  We boast of our national freedom, and we talk about universal suffrage, the ‘Home of the Free,’ etc.  Yet the serfs in Russia were freed in March, 1861, just before our Civil war began.  They freed their serfs without any war, and each serf received some acres of land.  They freed twenty-three millions, and we freed four or five millions of blacks; and all of us, who are old enough, remember that one of the fears in freeing the slaves was the number of lawless and ignorant blacks who, it was supposed, would come to the North.

“We talk about universal suffrage; a larger part of the antiquated Russians vote than of Americans.  Just as I came away from St. Petersburg I met a Moscow family, travelling.  We occupied the same compartment car.  It was a family consisting of a lady and her three daughters.  When they found where I had been, they asked me, in excellent English, what had carried me to St. Petersburg, and then, why I was interested in Pulkova; and so I must tell them about American girls, and so, of course, of Vassar College.