We buried him quietly in the churchyard at Arreton, the kind rector not asking for a baptismal certificate, for he knew that I was not a churchman, and Russie had never been baptized. In these things we follow prejudices. Mine were Baptist; his mother was an advanced Unitarian, and had been born in the Brook Farm community, of which her father was a member, so that we had no sympathy with paedobaptism, while the terrible effect of my own religious education forbade me to encumber the boy's mind with religious dogmas, and from the beginning I had forbidden any one in the house to teach him the name of God until he was old enough to understand what "God" meant; but one day during his illness I found him, when he should have been sleeping, weeping bitterly, and to my inquiry as to the cause of his trouble, he replied, "Do you think, Papa, that, if I went to sleep saying my prayers, God would be satisfied if I finished them after I woke?" That terrible hereditary conscience could not be laid, and perhaps the boy was fortunate in his early death. CHAPTER XXVI THE MONTENEGRINS AND THEIR PRINCE To me Russie's death was a crushing disaster. The care and constant preoccupation of my life was taken away, and nothing moved me to activity. I missed him every moment that I was awake, and in my condition I could not rally from the depression caused by the mental void and grief. I do not think I should have recovered from it had not Mr. Spartali conceived the idea of my going off to Herzegovina, where the insurrection of 1875 was just beginning to stir, and, to cut short my hesitation at the venture as a volunteer correspondent, got me an introduction to the manager of the "Times," and offered to pay my expenses should the "Times" not accept my letters. I knew so well the condition in which the Turkish Empire had been left by the Cretan affair, and the apathy that had ruled ever since, that I was convinced that a disaster was pending, and the state to which Russia had brought matters in the Ottoman Empire in 1869 pointed to a Slavonic movement this time. The manager was not of my opinion; he thought the disturbances would blow over in a few weeks, and nothing serious would come of it. I went home, but watched the news, and a few days after went again to the office and offered to go out at my own expense, with the understanding that if they printed my letters they should pay me for them, but that they ran no risk and need not print them unless they wished. The review of my Cretan book in the "Times" now served me as credentials by showing my knowledge of Turkish ways. At the same time I arranged to send letters to the New York "Herald," also as a volunteer, for no one then attached any importance to the rising.