appen. The author would make the new priest fall in love with
and marry one of the daughters, and then the whole family, including the
mother-in-law, would live happily ever afterwards."

"That is exactly how the Bishop arranges the matter. What the novelist
does with the puppets of his imagination, the Bishop does with real
beings of flesh and blood. As a rational being he cannot leave things
to chance. Besides this, he must arrange the matter before the young man
takes orders, because, by the rules of the Church, the marriage cannot
take place after the ceremony of ordination. When the affair is arranged
before the charge becomes vacant, the old priest can die with the
pleasant consciousness that his family is provided for."

"Well, Batushka, you certainly put the matter in a very plausible way,
but there seem to be two flaws in the analogy. The novelist can make two
people fall in love with each other, and make them live happily together
with the mother-in-law, but that--with all due respect to his Reverence,
be it said--is beyond the power of a Bishop."

"I am not sure," said Batushka, avoiding the point of the objection,
"that love-marriages are always the happiest ones; and as to the
mother-in-law, there are--or at least there were until the emancipation
of the serfs--a mother-in-law and several daughters-in-law in almost
every peasant household."

"And does harmony generally reign in peasant households?"

"That depends upon the head of the house. If he is a man of the right
sort, he can keep the women-folks in order." This remark was made in
an energetic tone, with the evident intention of assuring me that the
speaker was himself "a man of the right sort"; but I did not attribute
much importance to it, for I have occasionally heard henpecked husbands
talk in this grandiloquent way when their wives were out of hearing.
Altogether I was by no means convinced that the system of providing for
the widows and orphans of the clergy by means of mariages de convenance
was a good one, but I determined to suspend my judgment until I should
obtain fuller information.

An additional bit of evidence came to me a week or two later. One
morning, on going into the priest's house, I found that he had a friend
with him--the priest of a village some fifteen miles off. Before we had
got through the ordinary conventional remarks about the weather and the
crops, a peasant drove up to the door in his cart with a message that
an ol