those strange wild cries in the Russian tongue that seem at one's first
hearing so romantic and startling, rising sharply and yet lazily into
the air. He plunged along and found himself in the Nevski Prospect--he
could not mistake its breadth and assurance, dull though it seemed in
the mud and rain.

But he was above all things a romantic and sentimental youth, and he was
determined to see this country as he had expected to see it; so he
plodded on, his coat-collar up, British obstinacy in his eyes and a
little excited flutter in his heart whenever a bright colour, an Eastern
face, a street pedlar, a bunched-up, high-backed coachman, anything or
any one unusual presented itself.

He saw on his right a great church; it stood back from the street,
having in front of it a desolate little arrangement of bushes and public
seats and winding paths. The church itself was approached by flights of
steps that disappeared under the shadow of a high dome supported by vast
stone pillars. Letters in gold flamed across the building above the
pillars.

Henry passed the intervening ground and climbed the steps. Under the
pillars before the heavy, swinging doors were two rows of beggars; they
were dirtier, more touzled and tangled, fiercer and more ironically
falsely submissive than any beggars that, he had ever seen. He described
one fellow to me, a fierce brigand with a high black hat of feathers, a
soiled Cossack coat and tall dirty red leather boots; his eyes were
fires, Henry said. At any rate that is what Henry liked to think they
were. There was a woman with no legs and a man with neither nose nor
ears. I am sure that they watched Henry with supplicating hostility. He
entered the church and was instantly swallowed up by a vast multitude.