The aspect of the whole thing was something between a sacred picture and a scene in a Wagner opera. The tall peasants with red shirts, long hair and beards, stirring the furnace with long poles, looked the persons in the epic of the Niebelungen as we see it performed on the stage to the strains of a complicated orchestration. There was Wotan in a blue shirt, with a spear; and Alberic, with a grimy face and a hammer, was meddling with the furnace, and Siegfried, in leather boots and sheepskin, was smoking a cigarette and waving an enormous hammer, while Mimi, whining and disagreeable as usual, was having his head smacked. On the other hand, the peasants who were listening and taking part in the Te Deum were like the figures of a sacred picture--women with red and white Eastern head-dresses, bearded men, listening as though a miracle were about to be performed, and barefooted children with straw-coloured hair and blue eyes running about everywhere. Towards six o’clock the Te Deum at last came to an end, and the whole crowd moved and swayed around the furnace. A Russian crowd is like a large tough sponge. Nothing seems to make any effect on it. It absorbs the newcomers who dive into it, and you can pull it this way and press it that way, but there it remains, indissoluble, passive, and obstinate. Perhaps the same is true of the Russian nation; I think it is certainly true of the Russian character, in which as fundamental qualities there are so much apparent weakness and softness, so much obvious elasticity and malleability, and so much hidden passive resistance.