Dr. Liddon’s fame as a preacher had reached the Russian clergy, with the result that he and Mr. Dodgson found many doors open to them which are usually closed to travellers in Russia.  After their visit to Nijni Novgorod they returned to Moscow, whence, escorted by Bishop Leonide, Suffragan Bishop of Moscow, they made an expedition to the Troitska Monastery.

August 12th.—­A most interesting day.  We breakfasted at half-past five, and soon after seven left by railway, in company with Bishop Leonide and Mr. Penny, for Troitska Monastery.  We found the Bishop, in spite of his limited knowledge of English, a very conversational and entertaining fellow-traveller.  The service at the cathedral had already begun when we reached it, and the Bishop took us in with him, through a great crowd which thronged the building, into a side room which opened into the chancel, where we remained during the service, and enjoyed the unusual privilege of seeing the clergy communicate—­a ceremony for which the doors of the chancel are always shut, and the curtains drawn, so that the congregation never witness it.  It was a most elaborate ceremony, full of crossings, and waving of incense before everything that was going to be used, but also clearly full of much deep devotion....  In the afternoon we went down to the Archbishop’s palace, and were presented to him by Bishop Leonide.  The Archbishop could only talk Russian, so that the conversation between him and Liddon (a most interesting one, which lasted more than an hour) was conducted in a very original fashion—­the Archbishop making a remark in Russian, which was put into English by the Bishop; Liddon then answered the remark in French, and the Bishop repeated his answer in Russian to the Archbishop.  So that a conversation, entirely carried on between two people, required the use of three languages!

The Bishop had kindly got one of the theological students, who could talk French, to conduct us about, which he did most zealously, taking us, among other things, to see the subterranean cells of the hermits, in which some of them live for many years.  We were shown the doors of two of the inhabited ones; it was a strange and not quite comfortable feeling, in a dark narrow passage where each had to carry a candle, to be shown the low narrow door of a little cellar, and to know that a human being was living within, with only a small lamp to give him light, in solitude and silence day and night.

His experiences with an exorbitant drojky-driver at St. Petersburg are worthy of record.  They remind one of a story which he himself used to tell as having happened to a friend of his at Oxford.  The latter had driven up in a cab to Tom Gate, and offered the cabman the proper fare, which was, however, refused with scorn.  After a long altercation he left the irate cabman to be brought to reason by the porter, a one-armed giant of prodigious strength.  When he was leaving college, he stopped at the gate to ask the porter how he had managed to dispose of the cabman.  “Well, sir,” replied that doughty champion, “I could not persuade him to go until I floored him.”