and stores of food for the winter, such as salted cucumbers in casks, and other property, were packed away; to a narrow slip of a room on the front, where the meals for the family were prepared with remarkably few pots and no pans; to the living-room, with its whitewashed stone-and-mud oven in one corner, for both cooking and heating, a bench running round the walls on three sides, and a clean pine table in the corner of honor, where hung the holy images.  They had a fine collection of these images, which were a sign of prosperity as well as of devotion.  The existence of another tiny room also bore witness to easy circumstances.  In this room they slept; and the baby, who was taking her noonday nap, was exhibited to us by the proud papa.  Her cradle consisted of a splint market basket suspended from the ceiling by a stout wire spring, like the spring of a bird-cage, and rocked gently.  The baby gazed at us with bright, bird-like eyes and smiled quietly when she woke, as though she had inherited her parents’ gentle ways.  We believed them when they said that she never cried; we had already discovered that this was the rule with Russian children of all classes.

They were much interested to learn from what country we came.  I was prepared to find them unacquainted with the situation of America, after having been asked by an old soldier in the park, “In what district of Russia is America?” and after having been told by an izvostchik that the late Empress had come from my country, since “Germany” meant for him all the world which was not Russia, just as the adjective “German” signifies anything foreign and not wholly approved.

“Is America near Berlin?” asked our peasant hosts.

“Farther than that,” I replied.

They laughed, and gave up the riddle after a few more equally wild guesses.

“It is on the other side of the world,” I said.

“Then you must be nearer God than we are!” they exclaimed, with a sort of reverence for people who came from the suburbs of heaven.

“Surely,” I said, “you do not think that the earth is flat, and that we live on the upper side, and you on the lower?”

But that was precisely what they did think, in their modesty, and, as it seemed a hopeless task to demonstrate to them the sphericity of the globe, I left them in that flattering delusion.

I asked the old woman to explain her holy pictures to me, as I always enjoyed the quaint expressions and elucidations of the peasants, and inquired whether she thought the ikona of the Virgin was the Virgin herself.  I had heard it asserted very often by over-wise foreigners that this was the idea entertained by all Russians, without regard to class, and especially by the peasants.

“No,” she replied, “but it shows the Virgin Mother to me, just as your picture would show you to me when you were on the other side of the world, and remind me of you.  Only—­how shall I say it?—­there is more power in a wonder-working ikona like this.”