We—­degenerate through culture—­found the steams of the strong, coarse dishes rather unpleasant, and retreated by a back-way, which brought us to a spiral staircase.  We ascended for a long time, and finally emerged into the garret of the building, hot, close, and strawy as a barn-loft.  It was divided into rooms, in which, on the floors covered deep with straw, the happy pilgrims who had finished their dinner were lying on their bellies, lazily talking themselves to sleep.  The grassy slope in front of the house, and all the neighboring heights, were soon covered in like manner.  Men, women, and children threw themselves down, drawing off their heavy boots, and dipping their legs, knee-deep, into the sun and air.  An atmosphere of utter peace and satisfaction settled over them.

Being the only foreign and heterodox persons present, we began to feel ourselves deserted, when the favor of Sergius and Herrmann was again manifested.  P. was suddenly greeted by an acquaintance, an officer connected with the Imperial Court, who had come to Valaam for a week of devotion.  He immediately interested himself in our behalf, procured us a room with a lovely prospect, transferred his bouquet of lilacs and peonies to our table, and produced his bottle of lemon-syrup to flavor our tea.  The rules of the monastery are very strict, and no visitor is exempt from their observance.  Not a fish can be caught, not a bird or beast shot, no wine or liquor of any kind, nor tobacco in any form, used on the island.  Rigid as the organization seems, it bears equally on every member of the brotherhood:  the equality upon which such associations were originally based is here preserved.  The monks are only in an ecclesiastical sense subordinate to the abbot.  Otherwise, the fraternity seems to be about as complete as in the early days of Christianity.

The Valamo, and her rival, the Letuchie, had advertised a trip to the Holy Island, the easternmost of the Valaam group, some six miles from the monastery, and the weather was so fair that both boats were crowded, many of the monks accompanying us.  Our new-found friend was also of the party, and I made the acquaintance of a Finnish student from the Lyceum at Kuopio, who gave me descriptions of the Saima Lake and the wilds of Savolax.  Running eastward along the headlands, we passed Chernoi Noss, (Black-Nose,) the name of which again recalled a term common in the Orkneys and Shetlands,—­noss, there, signifying a headland.  The Holy Island rose before us,—­a circular pile of rock, crowned with wood, like a huge, unfinished tower of Cyclopean masonry, built up out of the deep water.  Far beyond it, over the rim of the lake, glimmered the blue eastern shore.  As we drew near, we found that the tumbled fragments of rock had been arranged, with great labor, to form a capacious foot-path around the base of the island.  The steamers drew up against this narrow quay, upon which we landed, under a granite wall which rose perpendicularly to the height of seventy or eighty feet.  The firs on the summit grew out to the very edge and stretched their dark arms over us.  Every cranny of the rock was filled with tufts of white and pink flowers, and the moisture, trickling from above, betrayed itself in long lines of moss and fern.