clothing, but they went into any shop and took what they wanted without paying for it. To be robbed by them was an earnest of prosperity, a certainty of blessing. They were accounted saints. They had the privilege of telling the truth, even to the Sovereign himself, and we shall see the Terrible, when brought to close quarters with one of them, yield to his bold words. The Church tolerated them, and even admitted them to paradise, and at the splendid funeral of the blajennyi Basil, to whom the masterpiece of Barma and Postnikov on the Kremlin Square is dedicated, the holy man's coffin rested on Ivan's own shoulder.
I have said enough to enable the reader to measure the abyss which parted Europe from this corner of the European world, at the moment when Russia was about to enter into contact with the civilizations lying nearest her, and thus to render the story of this evolution, which I am now about to commence, intelligible.
