days they are allowed to eat only fruit or vegetables. They take vows
of chastity, to which they are doubtless as recreant as the Roman
Catholic priests of Italy and elsewhere. The Government gives to each
member of the Order an annuity of forty roubles per annum, which
forms their only fixed income; and consequently they must depend
largely on the liberality of their congregations and the fees for
attendance upon funerals, marriages, and christenings. The priesthood
is divided into two classes,--the parish priests, called the white
clergy; and the monks, who are called the black clergy; but the
latter are comparatively circumscribed in number. We have seen that
dissenters are as common in Russia as in other countries; religious
intolerance apparently does not exist.

In returning from the monastery, the whole length of the Nevsky
Prospect was passed on foot. It was a warm summer afternoon of just
such temperature as to invite the citizens who remained in town for a
stroll abroad, and there was a world of people crowding the sidewalks
of this metropolitan road-way. The brilliant Russian signs in broad
gilt letters--so very like the Greek alphabet--which line the street,
must often be renewed to present so fresh an appearance. It is a
thoroughfare of alternating shops, palaces, and churches, the most
frequented and the most animated in the great city of the Neva. Four
canals cross but do not intercept this boulevard, named successively
the Moika, the Catherine, the Ligawa, and the Fontanka. These
water-ways, lined throughout by substantial granite quays, are gay
with the life imparted to them by pleasure and freight boats
constantly furrowing their surface. In our early morning walks,
pausing for a moment on the street bridges, large barges were seen
containing forests of cut-wood loaded fifteen feet high above their
wide decks, delivering all along the banks of the canals the winter's
important supply of fuel. Others, with their hulls quite hidden from
sight, appeared like immense floating hay-stacks moving mysteriously
to their destination with horse-fodder for the city stables. Barges
containing fruit, berries, and vegetable produce were numerous, and
these were often followed by flower-boats propelled with oars by
women and filled with gay colors, bound to the market square. The
canals seemed as busy as the streets they intersected. From one
o'clock to five in the afternoon the Nevsky Prospect, with the tide
of hu