Sketches of the Rites and Customs of the Greco-Russian Church

T3 OMAN’S birth caused great joy to his parents, who had been married twenty years ere they were blessed with a son.

His father was a deacon, in a considerable village not far from the Siberian tract. He lived in a wooden house of his own, with a palisaded garden in front, if that may be called a garden which was but a narrow slip of ground, so thickly planted with lilacs and raspberry and black-currant bushes, that at the time the fruit was ripe there was scarcely any possibility of getting at it. The dwelling consisted of a large lofty kitchen, a bed-room, and a parlour, all on the ground floor. The walls were not lath and plastered, there were no carpets on the floors, nor curtains at the windows; the furniture con-, sisted of a birch-wood sofa and a dozen chairs, covered with a large-patterned cotton print, a table before the sofa, and two smaller ones beneath the looking-glasses in the piers; besides this ordinary furniture there was a psaltery, on which the Deacon used to perform various sacred melodies on holiday evenings. The corner formed by the two windowed walls was hung with pictures of the Saviour, His Mother, the patron saints of the master and mistress of the house, and of the master’s deceased parents; some with silver or metallic settings, others in the rough and extra pre-Raphaelitish style called Souzdalsky, from the town where they are painted by thousands. The other walls were covered with portraits of the Imperial Family, and a few sentimental engravings from English annuals, with English titles that nobody in the village could read, and no one even knew where they were originally picked up; they were the parting gift of one of the many stanovoys that had ruled at Elenovka.