In memory and imagination, he conned over and over again each tender speech and glance, each mute caress and passionate kiss, with every circumstance and minutiæ of their occurrence and bestowal; and what lover has not done so since time began, and apples grew, and roses bloomed in Eden! Even his recent narrow escape and the gipsy's gratitude were forgotten in the ardour of his thoughts. And he sighed again, when thinking how wild and insane were the dreams in which he was indulging, as he touched his horse with the spurs, on seeing the three shining domes of the Troitza, or monastery of the Holy Trinity, rise before him amid the green woodlands. CHAPTER XII. ST. PETERSBURG. After traversing a green valley some five or six miles in length, bordered on each side by forests of fir trees, dark, solemn and acutely conical, where the sunlight could scarcely ever penetrate to the thick rank grass and herbage that grew below, and where a merry gurgling brook rushed noisily along by the side of the narrow horseway, Charlie Balgonie drew his bridle at the gates of the Troitza monastery, when its white walls, its three great cupolas, shaped each like a gigantic onion inverted, covered with plates of burnished copper, and all painted and bestarred, were shining gaily in the morning sun. There he was made welcome by the monks--quaint-looking men, in long black caftans, with high black caps, fashioned like our modern hats, but without brims, and having black veils floating behind over their long, straight hair. He deposited some money with the treasurer, declined the invitation of the sacristan to see the uncorrupted body of some saint with an unpronounceable name, reposing in its shrine like a silver bedstead, and its head begirt by a diadem with pearls as large as pistol bullets; for the saint had been a martyr, who, in the days of Ivan Basilovitch, the Tartars had rewarded for his attempts to convert them by knocking out his brains; and now he was a miserable mummified relic of humanity, before which, for many ages, thousands of devotees had knelt and wept and smote their breasts in paroxysms of prayer. Charlie waived the invitation; and after having a good breakfast in the refectory, and there telling his story to the monks, he was somewhat bewildered when informed by them, that after all his (certainly circuitous) journey with Podatchkine on the preceding evening and night, and after his riding since he had left the cottage of the gipsy, he was still barely twenty miles from the Louga! Was a spell cast upon him? was his horse bewitched, that he was to continue travelling thus, and yet never make progress? It almost seemed so; but one of the monks, a more shrewd man than his brothers, explained the whole affair as being consequent to the cunning of Podatchkine, and his scheme for destroying the dispatch-bearer.