There is another aspect of Moscow which the summer visitor can never know. That comes when the thermometer falls from its summer _average_ of 64.9° F. to its winter average of 14° F. This difference of 50° explains much that appears wanton in the architecture of buildings great and small; accounts for the galleries round the outside of the churches, for the extensive vestibules; for thick walls, still thicker roofs, and great spouts; for the plain surfaces and lack of projecting decorations, gargoyles and angular mouldings; for the distempered walls, which alone successfully stand the biting frosts of winter and the blistering summer sun. With the change to winter temperature a great quiet comes over the town, wheeled traffic is stopped, sledges glide over the frozen roads, and from the windless sky the great snowflakes can ever be seen idly and slowly floating in their long and leisurely descent to earth. A reddened sun appears for a short time each day in a leaden sky, and Moscow lives, is more active, more itself, than when the light of summer decks its walls and pinnacles in holiday garb. But at whatever season studied, Moscow will reveal traces of the past; will show that she has long smiled under the summer sun of good fortune and been wrinkled by the winter of adversity; scorched, too, by the volcanic fire of her own excesses, but now staid, hoary, strenuous, and of surprising vitality in all--[Russian in cyrillic letters]. CHAPTER XI _Ancient Customs and Quaint Survivals_ "The customs are so quainte As if I would describe the whole I feare my penne would fainte." G. TURBERVILLE (1568). Strange and unaccountable to the men of the Elizabethan age were the manners and customs of the Muscovites; at this day, some of the things these early visitors minutely described seem scarcely credible.