If you can speak no Russian, try your poor French, your poor German, or your good English.

You may be sure that the shopkeeper will answer in one or another, and even the drosky-driver picks up a little of some one of them.
"Of late, the Russian government has founded a medical school for women, giving them advantages which are given to men, and the same rank when they graduate; the czar himself contributed largely to the fund.
"One wonders, in a country so rich as ours, that so few men and women gratify their tastes by founding scholarships and aids for the tuition of girls--it must be such a pleasant way of spending money.
"Then as regards religion.

I am never in a country where the Catholic or Greek church is dominant, but I see with admiration the zeal of its followers.

I may pity their delusions, but I must admire their devotion.
If you look around in one of our churches upon the congregation, five-sixths are women, and in some towns nineteen-twentieths; and if you form a judgment from that fact, you would suppose that religion was entirely a 'woman's right.' In a Catholic church or Greek church, the men are not only as numerous as the women, but they are as intense in their worship.

Well-dressed men, with good heads, will prostrate themselves before the image of the Holy Virgin as many times, and as devoutly, as the beggar-woman.
"I think I saw a Russian gentleman at St.Isaac's touch his forehead to the floor, rise and stand erect, touch the floor again, and rise again, ten times in as many minutes; and we were one day forbidden entrance to a church because the czar was about to say his prayers; we found he was making the pilgrimage of some seventy churches, and praying in each one.
"Christians who believe in public prayer, and who claim that we should be instant in prayer, would consider it a severe tax upon their energies to pray seventy times a day--they don't care to do it! "Then there is the _democracy_ of the church.