No boat may cross the river before the Commandant, but he is followed by quite a little fleet of river craft manned by _mujiks_ in their different-coloured shirts, on a bright morning a picturesquely quaint sight. Salvos of artillery; curiously-shaped and many-coloured boats; guards presenting arms; the rays of the sun turning the ice-blocks into gigantic opals; the crowds watching on the quays; the golden steeples all ablaze with light; drums rattling and trumpets blaring; flags flying from every window! After this fashion Russia celebrates the funeral rites of the winter, the baptism of the spring. * * * * * When the Almighty first set his bow in the cloud it was not more welcome than the arrival of Palm Sunday to the starving Russian. It does not make an end of the sorrows of Lent, but it comes laden with hope: the austere and hungry days are numbered, and the beginning of a series of sublime ceremonials brings with it the buds of a new joy which will burst into life with the dawn of the paschal feast. Very solemn are the observances of the Holy Week in the Greek Church. The liturgies are grand, imposing, soul-stirring; their music so compelling and emotional that they bring home to one the strength of Tolstoy’s great saying, “Le sentiment religieux est après tout indispensable.” As a race, judging by the way in which we face our religion, we Britons are, I suppose, an unemotional people. With us ritual is a question of the individual; to one man a stimulus, to his neighbour a horror. In Russia, on the contrary, it seems to be a national necessity, satisfying an endemic craving; to the lower orders, indeed, the be-all and end-all of religion: not, as I think I have already shown, a religion necessarily acting as a high moral force or even as a deterrent, but in some mystic way a spiritual comfort in the present, as it is in the future the promise of the wiping out of all crime and salvation by virtue of the great Sacrifice. For the Slav the call to the soul must be through the imagination, and that is where the imagery of the Greek Church triumphs. A highly symbolical ritual is of the very essence of the orthodox faith, and since ritual there must be, where could you find it more reverent, more devotional, more suggestive of the Divine Mystery, than in the services of these last days of Lent? The music breathes tragedy; the swelling voices of the choristers rise from the lowest depth of sorrow to the sublimest heights of ecstatic adoration; the canticles and antiphons are so entirely one with the rites of the Passion that I imagined that this heaven-born music must be as old as the liturgies themselves, foreshadowing Wagner’s theory of the twin-birth of music and poetry. But that is not so. I was informed that it is no older than the eighteenth century. Could it, I wonder, have been based upon some much more ancient model? It is difficult to conceive these services without the solemn