dilapidated, straggling two-storeyed building, extends almost completely around the quadrangle; the chief rooms, on the _bel-étage_, communicate with a long outside covered gallery, closely resembling the yard of an old London inn, which is reached by the perron in the western corner. The Church of St Michael, the Archistratigus, was built conjointly with the Monastery in 1365, rebuilt in 1504, and later restored in its primitive style, so has preserved even more than any other church in Moscow the original character of Muscovite ecclesiastic architecture. The interior is well worth seeing, but access is not easy; the best time is after early matins, which are celebrated about thrice weekly at 7 A.M. The frescoes are very primitive, and for Moscow, original. The old-fashioned low ikonostas is of a type common to "wooden Russia"; the ancient ikons call only for the attention of the student, but on the High Altar is a tabernacle in the form of a church with twelve domes which has wider interest. It is the work of Remizov in the reign of Mikhail Theodorovich. Within the courtyard, traces of Tartar graves have been found; and the cemetery contains the tombs of Edeger--the last "Tsar" of Kazan, 1565--and of many Moscow families, as the Trubetskis, Kovanskis, Sherbatovs, etc. The state rooms are still used by the head of the Church in Moscow; they look out towards Ivan Veliki, immediately above the little window at which the Holy Bread is sold. Although the monastery has been the scene of many important events in connection with the history of the Church and of Moscow--it was here that Maxim, the Greek, studied, and Latin was first taught, 1506--there is nothing either in the refectory or common rooms connected with them, for the monastery was erected during the plague riots of 1771 and spoiled by the French. The church of the Patriarch Alexis is entered from the Tsar's Square through a portico, of a pseudo-Gothic style, designed by Kasakov in the eighteenth century, but the church itself was constructed in 1686, and the remains of St Alexis the Metropolitan then conveyed there in the presence of the Tsarevna Sophia and the boy-Tsars Ivan V. and Peter I. It occupies the site of an earlier church founded in 1483, and contains the incorruptible remains of the Saint. Alexis, the wonder-worker, was descended from a boyard family named Pleskov. Born in 1292, he passed twenty-two years of his life in Moscow, a student of the Bogo-yavlenski Monastery; after admission he was for twelve years one of the household of the Archbishop, and later became bishop of Vladimir, and Metropolitan of Kief.