was carefully preserved. When the Tsar married, it was not till this stage of the business that the Court beheld the new Sovereign, a boïarine of high rank lifting the corner of her veil on the point of an arrow. On this day it was the bride's parents who entertained the wedding guests. But on certain occasions they were exposed to a terrible humiliation. The husband's father might offer them a cup with a hole bored in it, stopped by the pressure of his finger. The finger removed, the contents of the goblet, wine or brandy, escaped, and the audience knew the young wife 'had not been what she should have been. …'
All through these festivities, except to pronounce certain sacramental words, the bride never spoke. Her silence, apart from these, was considered a proof of her being well brought up. Her companions, on the other hand, enjoyed a quite unusual freedom, of which they took liberal advantage, a joyous slackening of the bonds, sometimes degenerating into a sort of madness, which carried the most chaste and modest of creatures into sudden shamelessness and the wildest excess. And after all that, the heavy doors of the terem closed once more on the short snatch of gaiety, and on the fate of the newly-married wife.
The probable nature of that fate may be easily imagined. The Domostroï has no doubt exaggerated the austerity of domestic life, but it must have been very like a cloistered existence, all the same. Several times a day the denizens of every house of any size gathered in the krestovaïa komnata, a room intended as a place of prayer, and covered with ikons from its ceiling to its floor. All the events of life, small or great, involved the invocation of the sacred pictures, with which relics and other similarly precious objects—such as tapers that had been lighted at the celestial fire of Jerusalem, or fragments of a stone on which our Lord had set His foot—were venerated. Even outside the krestovaïa a woman's rosary was never out of her grasp, and in the hands of the recluses of the terem these instruments of supplication, which must needs be of artistic workmanship and blessed at some special centre of devotion, such as the Troïtsa or the monasteries of Solovki or Bielooziéro, were a faithful image of the monotonous and empty lives that slipped through their fingers with their Paters and their Aves.
Everybody, whether of high or humble rank, rose early: with the sun in summer-time, several hours before it in the winter. Even in the sixteenth century, time was still reckoned on the Oriental system, twelve hours in the day and twelve in the night, the equinox being taken to be the normal reckoning, and the first hour of the day corresponding with
