"Married, Maria!" cried her mistress; "when?" "The day after next," replied the woman, shedding tears. "So soon, Maria! And what sort of man are you going to wed?" The woman dropped her eyes. She could not say; she had not seen him yet. The proposeress had done it all, and sent her word to appear in church at four o'clock, the hour for marrying persons of her class. "You really mean to take this man whom you have never seen?" "I must," said the woman; "the prayers have been put up in church." "Do the parish popes raise no objections to such marriages?" "No," laughed the lady. "Why should they object? A wedding brings them fees; and in their cabins you will find more children than kopecks." The livings held by the parish clergy are not rich. Some few city holdings may be worth three or four hundred pounds a year; these are the prizes. Few of the country pastors have an income, over and above the kitchen-garden and plough of land, exceeding forty or fifty pounds a year. The city priest, like the country priest, has neither rank nor power in the Church. The only chance for an ambitious man is, that his wife may die; in which event he can take the vows, put on cowl and frock, obtain a career, become a fellow in the corporation of monks, and rise, if he be daring, supple, and adroit, to high places in his church. That the parish priests are not content with their position, is one of those open secrets in the Church which every day become more difficult to keep. As married men, they feel that they are needlessly depressed in public esteem, and that the higher offices in the system should lie open to them no less than to the monks. Being many in number, rich in learning, intimate with the people, they ought to be strong in favor; yet through the craft of their black rivals, they have been left, not only without the right of meeting, but without the means of making their voices heard. The peasant was never beaten down so low in the scale of life as his parish priest; for the serf had always his communal meeting, his choice of elders, his right of speech, and his faculty of appeal. The parish priests expect a change; they expect it, not from within the clerical body, but from without; not from a synod of monks, but from a married and reforming Tsar. This change is coming on; a great and healing revolution; an act of emancipation for the working clergy, not less striking and beneficent than the act of emancipation for the toiling serfs. CHAPTER LVII. A CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION. In the great conflict between monks and parish priests, the ignorant classes side with the monks, the educated classes with the parish priests.