at the door,--beggars in the midst
of poverty, to whom the poor gave their mites with gentle sympathy.

Russian graveyards are not, as a rule, like the sunny, cheerful homes of
the dead to which we are accustomed. This one was especially melancholy,
with its narrow, tortuous paths, uncared-for plots, and crosses of
unpainted wood blackened by the weather. The most elaborate monuments
did not rise above tin crosses painted to simulate birch boughs. It was
strictly a peasant cemetery, utterly lacking in graves of the higher
classes, or even of the well to do.

On its outskirts, where the flat, treeless plain began again, we found a
peasant sexton engaged in digging a grave. His conversation was
depressing, not because he dwelt unduly upon death and kindred subjects,
but because his views of life were so pessimistic. Why, for example, did
it enter his brain to warn me that the Finnish women of the neighboring
villages,--all the country round about is the old Finnish
Ingermannland,--in company with the women of his own village, were in
the habit of buying stale eggs at the Tzarskoe Selo shops to mix with
their fresh eggs, which they sold in the market, the same with intent to
deceive? A stale egg explains itself as promptly and as thoroughly as
anything I am acquainted with, not excepting Limburger cheese, and
Katiusha and I had had no severe experiences with the women whom he thus
unflatteringly described. He seemed a thoroughly disillusioned man, and
we left him at last, with an involuntary burden of misanthropic ideas,
though he addressed me persistently as _galubtchik_,--"dear little
dove," literally translated.

If I were to undertake to chronicle the inner life of Tzarskoe, the
characteristics of the inhabitants from whom I received favors and kind
deeds without number, information, and whatever else they could think of
to bestow or I could ask, I should never have done. But there is much
that is instructive in all ranks of life to be gathered from a prolonged
sojourn in this "Imperial Village," where world-famed palaces have their
echoes aroused at seven in the morning by a gentle shepherd like the
shepherd of the remotest provincial hamlets, a strapping peasant in a
scarlet cotton blouse and blue homespun linen trousers tucked into tall
wrinkled boots, and armed with a fish-horn, which he toots at the
intersection of the macadamized streets to assemble the village cattle;
where the strawberry peddler, recognizabl