The fact that the babies are washed every day was impressed on my mind by the behavior of the little creatures while undergoing the operation.  They protested a little in gentle squeaks when the water touched them, but quieted down instantly when they were wiped.  It is my belief that Russian children never cry except during their bath.  I heard no infantile wailing except in this asylum, and very little there.  Many Russian mothers of all ranks still tie up their babies tightly in swaddling clothes, on the old-fashioned theory that it makes their limbs straight.  But these foundlings are not swaddled.  After its bath, the baby is laid on a fresh, warm, linen cloth, which is then wrapped around it in a particular manner, so that it is securely fastened without the use of a single pin.  Two other cloths, similarly wrapped, complete the simple, comfortable toilet.  This and another Russian habit, that of allowing a baby to kick about in its crib clad only in its birthday suit, I commend to the consideration of American mothers.

The last thing in the asylum which is shown to visitors is the manner in which the babies are received, washed, weighed, and numbered.  It was early in December when I was there, but the numbers on the ivory disks suspended from the new arrivals’ necks were a good many hundred above seventeen thousand.  As they begin each year with No. 1, I think the whole number of foundlings for that particular year must have been between eighteen and nineteen thousand.  The children are put out to board, after a short stay at the asylum, in peasant families, which receive a small sum per month for taking care of them.  When the boys grow up they count as members of the family in a question of army service, and the sons of the family can escape their turn, I was told, if matters are rightly managed.  The girls become uniformed servants in the government institutions for the education of girls of the higher classes, or marry peasants.

The most famous of the gates which lead from the White Town through the white, machicolated walls into China Town* is the Iversky, or gate of the Iberian Virgin.  The gate has two entrances, and between these tower-crowned openings stands a chapel of malachite and marble, gilded bronze and painting.  The Iversky Virgin who inhabits the chapel, though “wonder-working,” is only a copy of one in the monastery on Mount Athos.  She was brought to Russia in 1666, and this particular chapel was built for her by Katherine II.  Her garment and crown of gold weigh between twenty-seven and twenty-eight pounds, and are studded with splendid jewels.  But the Virgin whom one sees in the chapel is not even this copy, but a copy of the copy.  The original Virgin, as we may call the first copy for convenience, is in such great demand for visits to convents and monasteries, to private houses and the shops of wealthy and devout merchants, that she is never at home from early morn till late at night, and the second copy represents her to the thousands