It occurred to us that it might prove an interesting experiment to try the monastery inn for breakfast, and even to sojourn there for a day or two, and abandon the open sewers and other traces of advanced civilization in the town.  Our way thither led past the free lodgings for poor pilgrims, which were swarming with the devout of both sexes, although it was not the busiest season for shrine-visiting.  That comes in the spring, before the harvest, at all monasteries, and, in this particular monastery, on the feast of the Assumption, August 15 (Russian style), 27 (European style).  But there was a sufficient contingent of the annual one million pilgrims present to give us a very fair idea of the reverence in which this, the chief of all Russian monasteries, is held, and of the throngs which it attracts.  But, as usual in Russia, sight alone convinced us of their existence; they were chatting quietly, sitting and lying about with enviable calmness, or eating the sour black bread and boiled buckwheat groats provided by the monastery.  I talked with several of them, and found them quite unconscious that they were not comfortably, even luxuriously, housed and fed.

The inn for travelers of means was a large, plain, airy building, with no lodgers, apparently.  The monks seemed frightened at the sight of us.  That was a novelty.  But they escorted us over the house in procession.  We looked at a very clean, very plain room, containing four beds.  It appeared, from their explanations, that pilgrims have gregarious tastes, and that this was their nearest approach to a single room.  I inquired the price.  “According to your zeal,” was the reply.  How much more effective than “What you please” in luring the silver from lukewarm pockets!  The good monks never found out how warm our zeal was, after all, for the reason that their table was never furnished with anything but fish and “fasting food,” they said, though there was no fast in progress.  The reason why, I could not discover; but we knew our own minds thoroughly on the subject of “fasting food,” from mushroom soup, fish fried in sunflower oil, and coffee without milk to that most insipid of dessert dishes, kisel, made of potato flour, sweetened, and slightly soured with fruit juice.  They told us that we might have meat sent out from town, if we wished; but as the town lay several versts distant, that did not seem a very practical way of coquetting with the Evil One under their roof.  Accordingly, we withdrew; to their relief, I am sure.  As we had already lived in a monastery inn, it had not occurred to us that there could be any impropriety in doing so, but that must have been the cause of their looks of alarm.  I believe that one can remain for a fortnight at this inn without payment, unless conscience interferes; and people who had stayed there told me that meat had been served to them from the monastery kitchen; so that puzzle still remains a puzzle to me.