“Madam,” he retorted, “I’d have you know that I am a gentleman,—­a gentleman of education.”

“Then pray solve the other mystery,—­why you, strong, young, healthy, handsome, are a professional beggar.”

He stalked off in a huff.  Evidently he was one of that class of “decayed nobles” of whom I had heard many curious tales in Moscow; only he had decayed at a rather earlier age than the average.

As we proceeded southward, pretty Little Russian girls took the place of the plainer-featured Great Russian maidens.  Familiar plants caught our eyes.  Mulleins—­“imperial sceptre” is the pretty Russian name—­began to do sentinel duty along the roadside; sumach appeared in the thickets of the forests, where the graceful cut-leaved birch of the north was rare.  The Lombardy poplar, the favorite of the Little Russian poets, reared its dark columns in solitary state.  At last, Kieff, the Holy City, loomed before us in the distance.

I know no town in Russia which makes so picturesque and characteristic an impression on the traveler as Kieff.  From the boundless plain over which we were speeding, we gazed up at wooded heights crowned and dotted with churches.  At the foot of the slope, where golden domes and crosses, snowy white monasteries and battlemented walls, gleamed among masses of foliage punctuated with poplars, swept the broad Dnyepr.  It did not seem difficult then to enter into the feelings of Prince Oleg when he reached the infant town, on his expedition from unfertile Novgorod the Great, of the north, against Byzantium, and, coveting its rich beauty, slew its rulers and entered into possession, saying, “This shall be the Mother of all Russian Cities.”  We could understand the sentiments of the pilgrims who flock to the Holy City by the million.

The agreeable sensation of approach being over, our expectations, which had been waxing as the train threaded its way through a ravine to the station, received a shock.  It was the shock to which we were continually being subjected whenever we made pious pilgrimages to places of historic renown.  On each occasion of this sort we were moved to reflect deeply on the proverbial blessings of ignorance.  It makes a vast difference in one’s mental comfort, I find, whether he accepts the present unquestioningly, with enthusiasm, and reconstructs the historic past as an agreeable duty, or whether he already bears the past, in its various aspects, in his mind, in involuntary but irrational expectation of meeting it, and is forced to accept the present as a painful task!  Which of these courses to pursue in the future was the subject of my disappointed meditations, as we drove through the too Europeanized streets, and landed at a hotel of the same pattern.  It is easy to forgive St. Petersburg, in its giddy youth of one hundred and seventy-five winters, for its Western features and comforts; but that Kieff, in its venerable maturity of a thousand summers, should be so spick and span with newness and reformation seemed at first utterly unpardonable.  The inhabitants think otherwise, no doubt, and deplore the mediaeval hygienic conditions which render the town the most unhealthy in Europe, in the matter of the death-rate from infectious diseases.