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Rh the unfortunate driver with abuse, and ended by fining him fifty kopéks — whether for being sober or for having the horses ready, I do not know. We piled our baggage into the sleigh, climbed in upon it, and rode out of the intoxicated settlement with thankful hearts. As the last faint sounds of revelry died away in the distance be- hind us, I said to the driver: "What 's the matter with everybody in this village? The whole population seems to be drunk."

"They 've been consecrating a new church," said the driver, soberly.

"Consecrating a church!" I exclaimed in amazement. "Is that the way you consecrate churches?"

"I don't know," he replied. "Sometimes they drink. After the services they had a guláinia [a sort of holiday promenade with music and spirituous refreshments], and some of them crooked their elbows too often."

"Some of them!" I repeated. "All of them, you mean. You 're the only sober man I've seen in the place. How does it happen that you 're not drunk?"

"I'm not a Christian," he replied, with quiet simplicity. "I'm a Buriát."

As a Christian — if not a member of the Holy Orthodox Church — I was silenced by the unconscious irony of the re- ply. The only sober man in a village of three or four hun- dred inhabitants proved to be a pagan, and he had just been fined fifty kopéks by a Christian official for not get- ting drunk with other good citizens, and thus showing his respect for the newly consecrated edifice and his apprecia- tion of the benign influence of the Holy Orthodox Faith!

About ten o'clock on the morning of Tuesday, December 1st, we drove into the town of Chíta, and took up our quarters in a small, one-story log hotel kept by a man named Biáchinski and known as the "Hotel Vládivostók." There was in Chíta, as I have said in a previous chapter, a tolerably