As a house-to-house visitation was impossible, I abandoned the quest, and drove to a photographer’s to buy some views of the town.  The photographer proved to be a chatty, vivacious man, and full of information.  I mentioned my dilemma to him.  He said that the policeman had told the exact truth, but that my author, to his positive knowledge, was in the Crimea, “looking up material.”  Then he questioned me as to what we had seen at the Fair, mentioning one or two places of evening entertainment.  I replied that we had not been to those places.  I had understood that they were not likely to suit my taste.  Had I been rightly informed, or ought I to have gone to them in spite of warning?

“No,” he replied frankly, after a momentary hesitation, “you ought not to see them.  But all the American women do go to them.  There was a party here last year.  O-o-o-oh, how they went on!  They were told, as you have been, that they ought not to go to certain places; so of course they went, and took the men in the party with them,—­which was just as well.  I’d have given something to see their faces at the time, or even afterwards!  An Englishman, who had traveled everywhere, and had seen everything, told me that nowhere, even in India, had he seen the like of the doings at this Fair; and he was greatly shocked.”  He added that an officer could not appear at these places in uniform.

I begged the photographer to remember in future that there were several sorts of American women, and that not all of them worked by the law of contraries.  In my own mind I wondered what those particular women had done, and wished, for the hundredth time, that American women abroad would behave themselves properly, and not earn such a reputation for their country-people.

On Sunday we went to the Armenian church, to see the service and to meet some Armenian acquaintances.  We found the service both like and unlike the Russian, in many points approaching more nearly to the Greek form.  The music was astonishing.  An undercurrent of sound, alternating between a few notes, was kept up throughout the service, almost without a break.  At times, this undercurrent harmonized with the main current of intoning and chanting, but quite as often the discord was positively distressing.  Perceiving that we were strangers, the Armenians showed their hospitality in an original way.  First, when one of the congregation went forward to the chancel railing and received from the priest the triple kiss of peace, which he then proceeded to communicate to another person, who passed it on in dumb show, and so on through the whole assembly, neither men nor women would run the risk of offending us by offering the simulated kiss.  Secondly, and more peculiar, besides throwing light on their motives in omitting the kiss, they deliberately passed us by when they brought round the plate for the collection!  This was decidedly novel!  A visit to the Armenian church in St. Petersburg convinced