One Motovilof, a landowner in the province of Penza, lame, unable to walk, applied for help to Seraphim, who promised the invalid, on conditions, a certain cure. Motovilof was to become a friend of Sarof; a supporter of the female desert. Yielding to these terms, he was told to go down to Voronej, and to make his reverence at the shrine of Metrofanes, a local saint, on which he would find himself free from pain. Motovilof went to Voronej, and came back cured. With grateful heart he gave Seraphim a patch of land for his female desert; and then, being busy with his affairs, he gradually forgot his pilgrimage and his miraculous cure. The pain came back into his leg; he could hardly walk; and not until he sent a supply of bread and clothes to Seraphim was he restored in health. Not once, but many times, the worldly man was warned to keep his pledge; a journey to the desert became a habit of his life; until he fell into love for one of Seraphim's fair penitents, and taking her home from her refuge, made that recluse his wife. More noticeable still is the story of Tikhon, sometime Bishop of Voronej, now a recognized saint of the Orthodox Church. Tikhon is the official saint of the present reign; the living Emperor's contribution to the heavenly ranks. Timothy Sokolof, son of a poor reader in a village church, was born (in 1724) in that province of Novgorod which has given to Russia most of her popular saints. The reader's family was large, his income small, and Timothy was sent to work on a neighbor's farm. Toiling in the fields by day, in the sheds by night; sleeping little, eating less; he yet contrived to learn how to read and write. Sent from this farm to a school, just opened in Novgorod, he toiled so patiently at his tasks, and made such progress in his studies, that on finishing his course he was appointed master of the school. His heart was not in this work of teaching. From his cradle he had been fond of singing hymns and hearing mass, of being left alone with his books and thoughts, of flying from the face of man and the allurements of the world. A vision shaped for him his future course. "When I was yet a teacher in the school," he said to a friend in after life, "I sat up whole nights, reading and thinking. Once, when I was sitting up in May, the air being very soft, the sky very bright, I left my cell, and stood under the starry dome, admiring the lights, and thinking of our eternal life. Heaven opened to my sight--a vision such as human words can never paint! My heart was filled with joy, and from that hour I felt a passionate longing to quit the world." A few years after he took the cowl and changed the name of Timothy for Tikhon, he was raised from his humble cell to the episcopal bench; first in Novgorod, afterwards at Voronej; the second a missionary see; the province of Voronej lying close to the Don Kozak country and the Tartar steppe.