GENERAL SOCIAL LIFE The whole life of the Russian people reminds those who visit them continually and in every possible way that they are in a religious country; for everywhere there is the _ikon_, or sacred religious picture. There are other ways, especially the columns of the newspapers full of notices of private and public ministrations and pathetic requests for prayers for the departed, of bringing religion continually before the public mind, but the _ikon_ is most in evidence. It is a picture in one sense, for it is a representation either of our LORD or of the Holy Virgin or of some well-known saint; but the garments are in relief, often composed of one of the precious metals and ornamented in some cases with jewels; and thus it is quite different from other sacred pictures. It is the first characteristic evidence of "Russia" to meet one's eyes on entering, and the last to be seen as one leaves, any public place. "A great picture of the Virgin and Child hangs in the custom-house at Wirballen," writes Mr. Rothay Reynolds at the beginning of _My Russian Year_, "with a little lamp flickering before it." "The foreigner, who was a few minutes before on the German side of the frontier and stands on Russian soil for the first time, looks at the shrine with curiosity. Porters are hurrying in with luggage, and travellers are chattering in half a dozen languages. An official at a desk in the middle of the great hall is examining passports. A man is protesting that he did not know that playing-cards were contraband; a woman is radiant, for the dirty lining she has sewn in a new Paris hat has deceived the inquisitors. Everybody is in a hurry to be through with the business, and free to lunch in the adjoining restaurant before going on to St. Petersburg. It is a strange home for the majestic Virgin of the Byzantine picture. "Here, at the threshold of the empire, Russia placards--S. Paul's vivid Greek gives me the word--her faith before the eyes of all comers. In the bustle of a custom-house, charged with fretfulness and impatience and meanness, Russia sets forth her belief in a life beyond the grave and her conviction that the ideals presented by the picture are the noblest known to mankind." Nowhere as in Russia is one reminded so constantly, in what we should consider most unlikely places, that we are in a Christian country. In the streets and at railway stations, in baths, hotels, post offices, shops, and warehouses, in the different rooms of factories and workshops, in private houses, rich and poor alike, in government houses, and even in places of evil resort which I will not specify, as well as in prisons, indeed in _every_ public place there is the _ikon_--most frequently representing the Holy Mother and Child--and its lamp burning before it.