to give me strength to stay till the end of the service."
"Why not to God direct?" I asked.
"It's not for a poor creature like me to trouble God to attend to me," said she. "No, I ask the Ugodniki, if they have time, to go to Him and ask Him at a convenient moment. . . ."
"As to the Tsar," said some one.
"But God has time for every one," said another, "and can attend to everything at once. . . ."
"Pozhalui, I suppose so . . ." said the old woman meekly in a cracked voice, and went on with her soup.
I talked with one of the monks about Father Seraphim. What a character the Russian hermit was; there is material in his life for the pen of another Carlyle writing a new Past and Present. He was silent all those thirty-five years, and then opened his mouth. Alas! no one could tell me the first words that he spoke. He was actually silent all the time that Napoleon was ravaging Russia, during the time when he was in occupation of the holy mother of Russian cities, Moscow. Napoleon was popularly understood in Russia as Antichrist, and when the news of the terrible French sacrilege spread over Russia there were all manner of extravagant rumours about the end of the world.
By this time Seraphim had obtained a name of great sanctity. Sick men had been restored to health by drinking from the hermitage well, the
