A great ceremony of the Greek Church takes place each year at the end of their Christmas season—the Benediction of the Waters—in every town and village in Russia and down along the coasts of Greece. In St. Petersburg the ceremony is performed by the Czar outside the Winter Palace. A wooden temple is put up out on the ice, decorated with gilt and paintings within, and surrounded by a hedge of fir boughs without. A hole is made in the ice, and to this a long procession makes its way; troops with bright banners, gorgeously robed bishops, and priests carrying lighted tapers and big ikons, are followed by more soldiers, the Czar and Czarina in magnificently jewelled robes, and after them their Court brilliant in uniforms and beautiful fur-trimmed dresses. They have all attended one service in the Imperial Chapel; they now have another on the ice. The water is blessed, evil spirits flee away, the soldiers fire a salute, and every one is sprinkled with the now holy water. The procession returns to the city, carrying with it great vessels of the holy water to be used later in all the churches. Then the people who have been looking on try to get to the hole; some draw up pailfuls of the cold liquid; others plunge bodily into the icy water, believing that so they will be cleansed from sin or sickness; many have even plunged delicate babies into it, content, if the child does not survive the shock, in the belief that its soul is forever saved. And over every door in the great city on that day rests the sign of the cross, lest the evil spirit expelled from the water should enter any home. [Illustration: Decoration] [Illustration: Men and women] St. Barbara’s Grain Only in the south of France, they say, is to be found the custom of planting St. Barbara’s grain on the fourth of December. Earthenware dishes an inch or two in depth are half filled with water, on the surface of which wheat is scattered, or the small, flattened seeds of the lentil, a leafy-stemmed plant whose honey-laden blossoms will, later in the year, draw swarms of golden bees to the fields where it is planted. The dish is then set in the warm ashes of the fireplace, or on the deep stone sill of a sunny window, and the grain is left to sprout and grow so that on the table of the Christmas Eve supper there may be this tender promise of the harvest of the year to come—a pale, delicate young greenness in strong contrast with the darker evergreens. The bent old _gran’mère_ by the hearth will tell you, that as the growth is thick and sturdy or scattered and thin, so will be the later harvests of grain, or honey.