f the churches, his coffin draped in the habiliments
of woe. The chanting rises ever and anon above the death-knell that
sweeps through the air. Standing aloof, we listen to the solemn sounds
of mourning. The funeral cortege comes forth from the church. The
hearse, with its plumed horses all draped in black, receives the
coffin; priests and mourners, bearing lighted tapers, lead the way,
chanting a requiem for the departed; and thus they pass before us--the
living and the dead--till they reach the Holy Gate. Then the priests
and the crowd bow down and pray; and when they have passed out from
under the sacred arch, they turn before the image of the Savior and
pray again; then rising, they cross themselves devoutly and pass on to
the last earthly resting-place of their friend and brother.

Surely death draws us nearer together in life. I thought no more of
forms. What matters it if we are all true to our Creator and to our
convictions of duty! Life is too short to spend in earthly
contentions.

"In the morning it flourisheth and groweth up; in the evening it is
cut down and withereth."

CHAPTER XV.

RUSSIAN MANNERS AND CUSTOMS.

Rude and savage as the lower orders are in their external appearance,
they certainly can not be considered deficient in politeness, if the
habit of bowing be taken as an indication. In that branch of
civilization they are well entitled to take rank with the Germans and
French, from whom, doubtless, they have acquired many of their forms of
etiquette. Something, however, of Asiatic gravity and courtliness
mingles with whatever they may have adopted from the more sprightly and
demonstrative races of the South; and a certain degree of dignity,
accompanied though it may be with rags and filth, is always observable
in their manners. The alacrity, good nature, and enthusiasm so
characteristic of the Germans, and the dexterous play of muscles and
vivacious suavity of the French, are wholly deficient in the
Russians--such of them, at least, as have retained their nationality.
The higher classes, of course, who frequently spend their summers at
the watering-places of Germany and their winters in Paris, come home,
like all traveled gentlemen, with a variety of elegant accomplishments,
the chief of which is a disgust for their own language and customs.
This, indeed, seems to be a characteristic of several other
nations--an inordinate desire to become denationalized by imitating
whatever is mer