lgrims kept theirs.

Outside, some of the peasants clustered about the priest and asked him
questions. As I glanced back over my shoulder, I saw the circle of
round, inquiring faces with their look of unbounded confidence.

We went around back of the monastery to an open plateau overlooking the
Dnieper. The river curved like a blue ribbon, and we could see the three
pontoon bridges for "military reasons." On the low bank opposite were
the soldiers' white tents laid out in regular squares. A ferry-boat was
carrying some soldiers across the river. The sun flashed on the
sentries' bayonets along the bank.

I heard the whine of a hand-organ. An armless beggar was turning the
crank of an organ with his bare feet. The plateau was fairly alive with
beggars, hopping about in the dust like fleas. Some were armless; others
legless. They swung along at our heels on long, muscular arms, with
leather on the palms of their hands, or dragged distorted, paralyzed
bodies that tried to stand upright by our sides.

In the white, hot sunlight squatted an old man with a white, pointed
beard so long that it lay out on the dust in front of him. In his arms
he held a book done up in red cloth. He was blind. If you put a coin in
a tin cup he wore round his neck, he would undo his book and open it,
and by divine inspiration read the holy words of the page in front of
him.

A row of seven blind women lined the exit. They began to whine as we
approached, and stretched out their hands gropingly. The eyes of one
woman had completely disappeared as though they had been knotted up and
pulled back into her head. Another's bulged like a dead fish's, with
that dull, bluish look in them. Another's lids were closed and crusted
with sores, flies continuously creeping over them, but apparently she
was indifferent. The seven blind women sat in rags and filth. Shall I
ever forget them in the burning sunlight, with their terrible eyes and
greedy fingers and the whine of their voices merging into the tune of
the hand-organ?

When we left the monastery, a group of wounded soldiers were just
entering. With them was a woman in a man's uniform. Her hair was curly
and short, and her chin pointed. Her feet looked ridiculously small in
the heavy, high, soldier's boots, and in spite of a strut her knees
knocked together in an unmistakably feminine manner. But the men treated
her quite as one of themselves. One soldier, who had had his leg cut off
up to the thigh,