This instance is typical of the muzhik’s placid hospitality. Not once but many times I knocked at peasants’ huts in out-of-the-way places and asked for shelter. Sometimes I received the greeting: “Where did God send _you_ from?” But muzhik curiosity is easily appeased. The psychology of muzhik religion brings one to the realm of mysticism and superstition. Russia is filled with sectarians. The Doukhobors are known in America because of their wholesale immigration into Canada a few years ago. They were a Caucasian sect. The Molokani are another, kindred sect, also originating in the Caucasus. In central Russia are many other sects, holding and practising strange tenets--among them, suicide by fire and exposure of their naked bodies to the furious storms of winter. Certainly no country in Europe has so great a variety of mysterious beliefs. But these all belong in a category apart from the superstitious orthodoxy of the average muzhik. To describe the sectarians would necessitate the compass of a volume, whereas there are certain salient characteristics of the accepted orthodoxy which are ever impressing themselves upon the traveler. At the outset, the forms of religion are well-nigh universally observed. Most peasants remove their hats when passing a church, or an icon, and cross themselves three times. In the interior one sometimes finds a small, crude shrine, set up at the entrance to a village. Before this shrine traveling muzhiks prostrate themselves, falling to their knees and bowing forward till their foreheads rest in the dust. Every muzhik has his revered icon and holy pictures. Usually the icon is set in the corner of the wall facing the door, so that every one who enters may reverence it. After each meal the peasants upon rising from the table bow before the icon, crossing themselves. I have seen icons in vodka shops thus reverenced by peasants coming to buy liquor. The peasant, too, has a blind, but sometimes very real, faith in miraculous images and pilgrimages to well-known shrines like the Madonna of Kazan and the Iberian shrine in Moscow are constantly maintained. The ringing of the village church-bells on a Sabbath morning or on the occasion of a saint’s day is something wondrous and memorable. There is nothing melodious in the sound. A terrible clanging and pounding, loud, wild, sonorous, discordant. But the muzhik believes that these sounds drive away evil spirits.