of the series, is particularly powerful and dreadful in that it shows in the simplest and most comprehensible way what lies at the bottom of the demoralization to which the people are subjected, and the chief danger that faces them.

"Go, go! God will help you!" says the girl, refusing to give to the beggar. "You see, his Reverence is here!"

Yes, it is a terrible picture!

The strength of a nation lies in the degree of truth in that religious understanding of the laws of life which guides its actions. I say the degree of truth, for a complete understanding of God is never possible to man. Man can but draw ever nearer and nearer to the one and the other. And the greatest amount of true religious understanding of life in our days has been and still is to be found among the illiterate, wise and holy Russian peasant-population. And in all kinds of ways: by Law Courts, taxation, conscription, and alcoholic poisoning for revenue's sake, they are surrounded by terrible temptations, and the most awful of these is the religious fraud which claims greater importance for the Church and its ministers than for mercy and brotherly love.

All this is presented in Orlóv's pictures, and so I think that I am not wrong in loving them.

These pictures show us the danger now menacing the spiritual life of the Russian people. And to realize a danger that was not noticed before is a step towards averting it.

1908.

APPENDIX

DARLING

By Antón Chékhov

OLENKA, the daughter of a retired civil servant, Plemyánnikov, sat musing in her back porch. It was hot, the flies were pertinaciously teasing, and it was pleasant to reflect that it would soon be evening. Dark rain-clouds were coming up from the east and bringing with them an occasional whiff of moisture.

In the middle of the courtyard Kúkin, who lived in a small house in the same courtyard and was manager and proprietor of the Tivoli Gardens, stood looking at the sky.

"Again!" he exclaimed despairingly. "It's going to rain again! Rain every day, every day, as though to spite me. One might as well hang oneself! It's ruination! Fearful losses every day!"

He raised and clasped his hands in despair, and turning to Olenka continued:

"There, Olenka Semënovna, that's the life we lead. It's enough to make one cry. One works, tries hard, wears oneself out, gets no sleep at night, and racks one's brains what to do for the best-and what's the result? On the one hand there's the ignorant boorish public! I give them the very best operetta, a fairy-like masque, splendid comic singers, but is that what they want? Do you suppose they understand anything of all that? What they want is what is given in a booth at a fair! Trash, is what they demand! On the other hand, look at the weather! Rain almost every evening.

As it started on the 10th May, so it went on the whole of May

and June. It's simply awful!

The public don't come, but

I have to pay the rent and the artistes!"

Next evening the clouds again began to gather, and Kúkin said with an hysterical laugh:

"Well, what of it? garden with me in it! or the next!

Rain away! Let it flood the whole

Let me have no luck in this world Let the artistes take proceedings against me! Even if I go as a convict to Siberia! Or Ha, ha, ha!"

What is a trial?

to the scaffold!

The next day it was the same again.

Olenka listened to Kúkin silently and seriously, and sometimes tears came into her eyes. In the end Kúkin's misfortunes touched her and she came to love him. He was short and lean, with a sallow complexion, twists of hair were curled on his temples, he spoke in a thin tenor voice, and when he spoke his mouth twisted, and his face always expressed despair, but still he aroused in her a real and profound affection. She always loved someone and could not exist without it. Formerly she had loved her papa, who now sat in an armchair in a dark room, ill, and breathing with difficulty; she loved her aunt, who sometimes-once in two years-came from Byansk; and before that, when she was at the secondary school, she had loved her French master. She was a quiet, soft-hearted, compassionate young woman, with a mild tender look in her eyes and very good health. At the sight of her plump rosy cheeks, her soft white neck with a dark little mole on it, and the kind naïve smile which appeared on her face when she listened to anything pleasant, men thought, "Yes, she's all right," and smiled too, and lady-visitors could not refrain from suddenly seizing her hand in the middle of a conversation and exclaiming with a gush of delight: "You darling!"

The house in which she had lived since her birth and