serve as retreats and as places of burial for the brethren.  The catacombs, abandoned as residences on the construction of the cells above ground, have not escaped disasters by caving in.  Drains to carry off the percolating water, and stone arches to support the soil, have been constructed, and a flourishing orchard has been planted above them to aid in holding the soil together.  Earthquakes in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries permanently closed many of them, and when the Tatars attacked the town, in the thirteenth century, the monks boarded up all the niches and filled in the entrances with earth.  Some of these boards were removed about a hundred years ago; some are still in place.  The original extent of the caves cannot now be determined.

The entrance to the near catacombs of St. Antony is through a long wooden gallery supported on stone posts, at a sharp slope, as they are situated twenty-four fathoms below the level of the cathedral, and twenty-two fathoms above the level of the Dnyepr.

A fat merchant, with glowing black eyes and flowing, crisp, black beard, his tall, wrinkled boots barely visible beneath his long, full-skirted coat of dark blue cloth, hooked closely across his breast, descended the gallery with us.  Roused to curiosity, probably, by our foreign tongue, he inquired, on the chance of our understanding Russian, whence we came.

I had already arrived at the conclusion that the people at Kieff, especially the monks and any one who breathed the atmosphere within their walls, were of an enterprising, inquisitive disposition.  My last encounter had been with the brother detailed, for his good looks and fascinating manners, to preside over the chief image shop of the monastery.

“Where do you come from?” he had opened fire, with his most bewitching glance.

“From the best country on earth.”

“Is it Germany?”

The general idea among the untraveled classes in Russia is, that all of the earth which does not belong to their own Emperor belongs to Germany, just as nyemetzky means “German” or “foreign,” indifferently.

“No; guess again,” I said.

“France?”

“No; further away.”

“England, then?”

“No.”

“Hungary?”

Evidently that man’s geography was somewhat mixed, so I told him.

“America!” he exclaimed, with great vivacity.  “Yes, indeed, it is the best land of all.  It is the richest!”

So that is the monastic as well as the secular standard of worth!  This experience, repeated frequently and nearly word for word, had begun to weary me.  Consequently I led the fat merchant a verbal chase, and baffled him until he capitulated with, “Excuse me.  Take no offense, I beg, sudarynya.  I only asked so by chance.”  Then I told him with the same result.

This was not the last time, by many, that I was put through my national catechism in Kieff.  Every Kievlyanin to whom I spoke quizzed me.  Of course I was on a grand quizzing tour myself, but that was different, in some way.