It was Wednesday, the day of the bazaar. The bazaar in the village is the mart, where the buying and selling of meat, provisions, fruit, melons, fish, hardware, ironmongery, china, and books are conducted. This takes place once a week on Wednesdays, and peasants flock in from the neighbouring villages to buy their provisions. But this afternoon the bazaar was deserted. The whole population of the village was gathered together on the dry brown grassy square in front of the church to take part in the ceremony. At four o’clock two priests and a deacon, followed by a choir consisting of two men in their Sunday clothes, and by bearers of gilt banners, walked in procession out of the church. They were dressed in stiff robes of green and gold, and as they walked they intoned a plain song. An old card table with its stained green cloth was placed and opened on the ground opposite and not far from the church, and on this two lighted tapers were set together with a bowl of holy water. The peasants gathered round in a semicircle with bare heads and joined in the service, making countless genuflexions and signs of the cross, and joining in the song with their deep bass voices. When I said the peasants I should have said half of them. The other half were gathered in a dense crowd round the furnace, which was built of bricks and open on both sides to the east and to the west, and fed with wooden fuel. The men in charge of the proceeding stood on both sides of it and stirred the molten metal it contained with two enormous poles. On the southern side of the furnace was a channel through which the molten metal when released was to flow into the cast of the bell. The crowd which was assembled here was already struggling to have and to hold a good place for the spectacle of the release of the metal when the solemn moment should arrive. Three policemen were endeavouring to cope with the crowd; that is to say, one police officer, one police sergeant, and one common policeman. They were trying with all their might to keep back the crowd, so that when the metal was released a disaster should not happen; but their efforts were in vain, because the crowd was large, and when they pressed back a small portion of it they made a dent in it which caused the remaining part of it to bulge out; and it was the kind of crowd--so intensely typical of Russia--on which no words, whether of command, entreaty, or threat, made the smallest impression. The only way to keep it back was by pressing on it with the body and outstretched arms, and that only kept back a tiny portion of it. In the meantime the Te Deum went on and on; and many things and persons were prayed for besides the bell which was about to be born. At one moment I obtained a place from which I had a commanding view of the furnace, but I was soon oozed out of it by the ever-increasing crowd of men, women, and children.