Tell it out in tones of triumph, or with

tears and quickened breath, Manhood's stronger than the storm, and Love is mightier than death!"

Many a common and discouraged life has here been touched to brighter and braver convictions, and has met its first impulse to a career which has at last been crowned with a great success. Canon Farrar tells of a poor bookseller's boy who, one day just a hundred years ago, sat down by the northern door of the Abbey, weary with his load of books, and burst into tears at his prospect of a dreary and drudging life; but as he lifted up his eyes and saw the statues around him of men who had fought bravely the battle of life, he took heart and courage and went his way, and after weary struggles became in India a benefactor of mankind.

The very pavements in this farfamed house again and again are made beautiful by the many-coloured hues as they softly fall upon them from the richly-painted windows. So loving and sympathetic contact with this matchless gallery of the wise and good makes the admiring soul a sharer, in the finer, costlier treasures which festoon this splendid sanctuary and tomb.

It is said that when the Mosque of St. Sophia at Constantinople was built, the mortar was charged with SACKVILLE, N.B.

musk, and to-day the perfume fills the air, though hundreds of years have rolled away. But a sweeter fragrance clings to the walls and floors of Westminster Abbey, for the very atmosphere is filled with influences which give tone and strength and hope and intellectual and moral health to all who place themselves within the range of their inspiring and electric touch.

Here, then, in this consecrated edifice, diademed with the applause and coronets of a nation, we have history, biography, poems, and victorious principles in stone, but in stone wrought out in countless forms of wondrous skill and beauty, and glorified by the transfiguring min istry of the human intellect, and the patient, marvellous creations of the human hand. In the clustering columns, pillars, arches, transepts, stalls, naves, cloisters, aisles, and windows, and all the contents of this century-crowned Abbey, we have a psalm-rich, solemn and grand.

Into this great national hymn of praise have been wrought lives that toiled for years amid disappointment and disaster; but at last, out of all the dust and darkness, the pain and strife and fire, Westminster Abbey, with all its inspiring contents and architectural grandeur, becomes the pride of a nation and the wonder of the world.

THE delights of sledge locomotion were not vouchsafed to those who journeyed through Russia during the terrible winter of the famine. Unusual quantities of snow fell from one end of the land to the other. Many of the paths when once blocked were not reopened because of the dearth of horses and the weakness of the few that had been kept alive, while the practicable roads and paths were, as a rule, very uneven. The difference between the easy progress of a launch on the calm surface of a river, and the helpless pitching of a coaster in a dirty night on the Channel, is not greater than that of sleighing on the levelled drives of St. Petersburg and Moscow, compared with the struggle to get across the snowblocked country outside the towns. This comparison is not a far-sought one, for people subject to sea-sickness are almost invariably seized with vomiting when sledging over bad roads. It is also an extremely arduous means of locomotion, and often at the end of a hundred-miles' drive I didn't know on which side to lie down to rest, so bruised was my body from my having been continually thrown against the sides. of the sledge, and occasionally clean over them into the snow.

I served my apprenticeship in a sledge with M. Alexander Novikoff, on Madame Olga Novikoff's estates at Novo Alexandrofka, in the northern part of the government of Tamboff. Amongst other things, he initiated me into the modus operandi to be followed in case of a snowstorm. These storms constitute the great danger of sledge-travelling in Russia. The dry branches and wisps of straw which are placed in the snow to mark the highways are frequently covered up or carried

1

If

away by the force of the storm. this happen, the traveller is helpless, scarcely daring to move lest he miss his foothold on the hard-beaten track and sink girth deep in the soft snow that lies on either side of it. Should he find himself in such a position, he is to be congratulated if he has horses that know the locality, for he can then give them their heads, and in all probability they will drag the sledge safely to the next post-station, even in a blinding snowstorm, through which it is impossible to see a couple of yards ahead. The sagacious animals can feel when they are on the beaten track by the resistance of the snow to their hoofs. But should the horses be strange to the country, or should they happen to run wide of the path and sink in the deep snow, they must be cut loose and allowed to take care of themselves while the traveller turns his sledge on end, bottom against the storm, and makes himself as comfortable as he can in the shelter it affords. As the snow beats against the bottom of the sledge it forms a bank over which the storm will drive, and if the weather-bound voyager be not suffocated or starved, there is little danger of his being frozen to death, for the heap of snow accumulated around the sledge will keep him warm.

"Touch your nose occasionally," said M. Novikoff, who was explaining this as we drove in a high wind one morning.

I put my gloved hand up and felt where my nose ought to be. There was nothing! I took off my glove and tried again.

"Look here," I said. "It's gone!"

"Rub it," replied M. Novikoff, who continued talking as if the loss of

my nose was a matter of the smallest concern.

I gathered a handful of snow from the collar of my furs, and applied myself to the task of getting life back into my nose.

We

It was not long before I ran near to having to put M. Novikoff's instructions into practice. I was making a journey with Count Alexis Bobrinskoy to his estates in the government of Samara, where the famine was working terrible ravages amongst the peasants. started from the railway town of Sizran on a hundred and fifty miles' sledge-drive into this part of wildest Russia. As the journey proceeded, the roads became worse and worse. Immense quantities of snow obstructed them, and frequently we were obliged to harness the three horses tandem and put a man on the leader to pick out some sort of a path. The track lay over the ice of the Volga. It might be supposed that travelling on the surface. of the frozen river would be easier than over the uneven, unmade country roads. It is not always so. When this great river freezes, the floating masses of ice are driven upon one another until the surface is not unlike what a choppy sea would be were it possible to freeze it instantaneously. A thick layer of snow gives the appearance of a level path; but appearances are deceptive, and the passage of the sledge soon shows up the irregu larities. At one moment the sledge is on end, being strained over the front of an enormous block of ice; the next instant the vehicle goes down with a shock on the other side, nearly knocking the horses off their feet as it overtakes them. moment later it is skidding sideways down another incline, or is careering half sideways, half backwards off the track, menacing to drag the horses after it.

A

The paths across the desert of snow were often as though a de

vastating army had passed over them. At nightfall wolves prowled the country, and fed on the bodies of the cattle which had fallen dead by the side of the sledge-tracks. Every now and then I came upon one of the brutes. It would trot leisurely from the carcass and watch the passage of the sledge, its lean form exaggerated out of all proportion by the evening mists. There was no danger for the living, because the plains were strewn with dead cattle, and wolves are cowardly creatures when running singly.

Out on the Ural steppes, away from town and village, the lower animals paid their tribute to the plague that occasioned so much suffering amongst men. There are hundreds of thousands of birds on the desert between the Volga and the Ural which are entirely dependent for their subsistence on leavings of horses, the sundry ears of corn that fall from laden sledges, and the broken food thrown to them by people who traverse the country.

the

Every little thing breaks the monotony of journeying across these Russian plains. I recollect one afternoon hearing talking close beside me-it seemed as if somebody had got into the sledge. Turning sharply round I found my face close to the blade of a brightly polished axehead. A Tartar lad had thrown it over the back of the sledge as a kind of grappling hook, and, hanging on to the handle, he ran behind for an hour or so with the razor-like edge remaining by the side of my head the while. I felt like pushing it off in sign of protestation, but I did not do so for fear the young Tartar might attempt to grapple the sledge a second time and put the blade of the axe through my head instead of by the side of it.

I have not mentioned my equipment for this formidable journey through a famine-stricken land. It was of the simplest. I had a portmanteau and a hold-all, and what

the hold-all would not hold was strapped in my travelling rugs until their bright colours caught the eye of an artful driver, who managed to leave" them at a spot the police never succeeded in discovering. In the hold-all I carried a small supply of beef tea and dry biscuits, to be prepared for such emergencies as a delay en route or snowing-up might occasion. I also carried a packet of candles, for I knew that wherever there was a food famine it was accompanied by an oil famine. The biscuits were in turn frozen and sodden. In sledge travelling nothing is proof against the frost and snow.

At one point of my journey I had been living on beef tea, spread like butter on biscuits, for about a couple of days when I arrived at a village where famine-bread was being handed out to starving peasants. How welcome a piece would be! I did not wait in the dreary file of haggard, ill-clothed men and women, who crowded round the door of the building, but pushed my way straight into the bakery, and while making the usual journalistic inquiries as to the state of things in the stricken hamlet I took up a lump of famine bread and ate it. The local police officer probably noticed the appetite with which I devoured this piece of black, insipid bread, for with a tact that amused me immensely when I thought of it afterwards, he invited me to lunch with him. The invitation was conditional, though the spirit in which it was given was not the less kindly for that.

"You are a journalist," he said. "If you come into my house I shall be obliged to ask you to show me your passport. If it is not inconvenient to you to have your passage through my district reported, come and lunch with me."

At that time I was lying low and working under the illusion that my movements had not excited the

attention of the authorities. It would not do to spoil my work for the sake of a lunch.

"How will you advise St. Petersburg of my passage?" I asked.

"By letter to the Governor. He can do as he likes."

It took me very few seconds to decide. I was at least three days' distance from the governmental town. By the time the authorities received the police officer's report I should be-I hadn't the faintest idea myself where- certainly far from the hospitable place where this incident was happening.

I had a nice lunch, and, with the aid of a little German that the officer spoke, I learned a good deal, and was shown much that interested me. On leaving, I looked at my passport and noticed that the visé was No. 1, indicating, perhaps, that I was the first foreigner who had passed through that out-of-the-way locality for many years.

It was early in the spring when I returned to Kazan from a trip up the Siberian road, and I had to hurry to Nijni Novgorod without stopping either for food or rest. The governor of Kazan very kindly sent to the post-station on the eve of my departure to say how necessary it was that I should reach a railway centre before the break-up of the ice on the Volga would cut Kazan off from the rest of the world for weeks. I had relays of no fewer than fiftyseven horses for the journey between these two towns; still, it was a grave question whether I should reach Nijni Novgorod before the ice gave way. The Volga, swollen by the volume of water that had fallen into it from the melting snow, rose beneath the ice, and at some spots lifted it and broke it away from the banks. In places the sledge ran for miles through several inches of water. Every now and then it dropped into a pool of slush a couple of feet deep and I was drenched, and everything I had