There is a church almost in every street, and the Kremlin is a citadel of cathedrals. During Holy Week, towards the end of which the evidences of the fasting season grow more and more obvious by the closing of restaurants and the impossibility of buying any wine and spirits, there are, of course, services every day. During the first three days of Holy Week there is a curious ceremony to be seen every two years in the Kremlin. That is the preparation of the chrism or holy oil. While it is slowly stirred and churned in great cauldrons, filling the room with hot fragrance, a deacon reads the Gospel without ceasing (he is relieved at intervals by others), and this lasts day and night for three days. On Maundy Thursday it is removed in silver vessels to the Cathedral. The supply has to last the whole of Russia for two years. I went to the morning service in the Cathedral of the Assumption on Maundy Thursday. “It’s long, but it’s very, very beautiful.” The church is crowded to suffocation. Everybody is standing up, as there would be no room to kneel. The church is lit with countless small wax tapers. The priests are clothed in white and silver. The singing of the noble plain chant without any accompaniment ebbs and flows in perfectly disciplined harmonies; the bass voices are unequalled in the world. Every class of the population is represented in the church. There are no seats, no pews, no precedence or privilege. There is a smell of incense and a still stronger smell of poor people, without which, some one said, a church is not a church. On Good Friday there is the service of the Holy Shroud, and besides this a later service in which the Gospel is read out in fourteen different languages, and finally a service beginning at one o’clock in the morning and ending at four, which commemorates the Burial of Our Lord. How the priests endure the strain of these many and exceedingly long services is a thing to be wondered at; for the fast, which is strictly kept during all this period, precludes butter, eggs, and milk, in addition to all the more solid forms of nourishment, and the services are about six times as long as those of the Roman Catholic or other Churches.