Throwing open the well-thumbed, poorly kept register, in such striking contrast to the Y. M. C. A. secretary's card index, he said: "Look how many I have buried this month," and he counted them, and there were eighteen, "all of them slain in that dreadful mine, and no one in the Company or in the town cares how they were buried. These Americans have no souls. They send an undertaker who wants to bury them like dogs, and the quicker the thing is done the better. They sent me notice shortly after I came here that the funerals lasted too long and kept the men from work. Look how those men walk! My _mujiks_, who walked like princes, now bend their backs before your dirty coal, and walk like slaves." His complaint was not altogether unreasonable. In some things he was right, in many things he was wrong; but to argue with a Russian is as hopeless as to try to argue with Niagara Falls. I did tell him that while the Russian here must bend his back over his work, he does not have to bend it at every corner before the _icon_ or before every policeman he meets; that here, by virtue of the American Spirit, his soul may be freed from superstition and his mind from darkness. When in parting the priest embraced and kissed me, he said: "No, even you don't understand the Russian Soul." The Herr Director suffered his embrace with good grace, but when the secretary's turn came he fled. To be kissed by a man is a sentimentality which the American cannot endure. "We don't understand the Russian Soul," I said to him, "neither you nor I, but one thing I do know. When the coal has been dug out of these hills and these cities shall have gone the way of Sodom and Gomorrah, and your churches and Y. M. C. A. may have vanished because it did not pay to keep them going, this Russian Soul will endure; and the sooner we learn to understand it the better for us and for them and for our country." When we left the Russian church and its faithful priest, the Frau Directorin told us that the children were incredibly filthy, and that she had spent the time we wasted in argument cleaning them up, good _hausfrau_ that she is. The secretary was thinking deeply, and when he deposited us at the hotel, he thanked me for revealing something which, although so near, he would never have discovered. The Herr Director kept me up until midnight talking about the Slavic menace to Germany, and the intellectual poison of its modern literature. We reached Niagara Falls the next afternoon, and, as I had feared, neither of my guests showed any surprise nor felt any thrill. I could understand the Herr Director's coolness towards our natural wonder, for he had seen it thirty years before; but his wife's attitude was inexplicable, until she told me what I had all along anticipated. Her capacity for receiving impressions had been exhausted by the city of New York, and after seeing the "high-scraps" nothing astonished her.