Connecticut western news., 1892-10-20
A REIIaIoI1s PEAsANrRY.

pie would halt before taking it and re- hgiously cross themselves and utter prayer for the donors. Some of them would come staggering back and say, ''Please tell us who sent this bread to us." And when told it came from America they would say: "What part of America? Please give us the names of those who sent it." An, God only. knows the names of those who sent it, but he certainly does know, and many prayer IS going up, warrant you, day by day, for those who sent flour by the ship Leo. Perhaps some of us at our tables rattle off prayer that may mean nothing, although we call it s'saying grace" but warrant when those people who received the bread which saved their lives ''said grace" it meant some thing. Our religion may not demand that we "cross ourselves" but I have learned that while crossing ones self in form 1 believe in most cases it means: "Oh, thou of the suffering cross of Cal vary, have mercy on me and accept my gratitude" Prefer your own form of religion by all means, but do not depre- ciate the religious forms of others. From all can learn there were several good people before we were born, and I rather expect there will be several left after we are dead. I have travelled in many lands, but 1 tell you plainly, as told Emperor Alexander III in the palace at Peterhoff, that I had never been so inn pressed with the fidelity to their religion of any people as by what had seen in Russia, and especially among her public men.
 said respectfully to a Russian when I saw him cross himself, What do you do that for?" "Oh," he said, "when do that always say, God have mercy on mel" I hold in my hand something very suggestive. What does that black and uncomely thing look like? That is what is called hunger bread from Rus sia; that is what millions of people lived on for months before help came from England, Scotland, Ireland and Amer ica; that is mixture which seems to have in it not one grain of sustenance. It is mixture of pig weed and chaff and the sweepings of stables. That is some thing which if dropped in the street your dog or cat might sniff at, but would not eat. That was the only food on which millions of men and women lived.
 You must look at that hunger bread of Russia before you can get proper appre- citation of what an attractive and beau tiful thing good loaf of bread is. It is so common to us we cannot realize it's meaning. Stop and look at it in bak- cry window or see it on your family ta- ble-I mean an honest loaf of bread, white as ball of packed snow, with a crust brown as the autumnal woods, and | for keen appetite more aromatic than howers-a loaf of bread as you remem- Der 1t in childhood, when the knife in | the hand of your father or mother cut clean through from crust to crust and | put before you, not quarter of slice or half a slice, but full round slice and another and another just suited to boy always ready to eat and for the most time hungry, even in well sup piled house. 1 remember and you re- member, if you had healthy childhood, just how it tasted. My! Myl Plum | pudding does not taste as good now as that plain bread then. It was then | bread at the table and bread between meals, and bread before breakfast and bread before going to bed.
 THE POETRY OF BREAD.
 Why does not some poet ring canto on loaf of bread, or some modern Ra- phael paint it, or some historian tell it's history? Not like many articles of food, pretentious, and iced all over like we'd ding cake, or dotted with fantastic in ,fC r,,,f fhof 1ao 1f the earth, that richest yield of the four mill, that best benediction of hot oven, God given loaf of bread. But the rhythm of it, the luxury of it, the mean | ing of it, the benediction of it, the divine mercy of it, only those know who have seen famine. No wonder Christ put this food into the sacrament and said of broken loaf of bread, This is my body" Thank God that sver saw that transcendent and compact kindness of the infinite Coda loaf of bread. And it was our joy this supmer to hand over shipload of material for gladdening many thousands of Russians with such
 beatitude. But 1 have been asked
 by good people in Great Britain and
 America again and again, Why did not
 the prosperous people of Russia stop that
 suffering themselves, making it useless
 for other nations to help2 And I am
 always glad when 1 hear the question
 asked, because it gives me an opportu-
 nifty of explaining. Have you any idee
 what it requires to feed twenty million
 people? There is only one being in the
 universe who can do it, and that is the
 Being who this morning breakfasted
 sixteen hundred million of the human
 race. The nobility of Russia have not
 only contributed most lavishly, but
 many of them went down and staid fo1
 months amid the ghastliness and the
 horror and the typhus fever and the
 smallpox that they might administer tc
 the suffering. sat at the dinner table
 in the house of one of our American rep
 resentatives beside a baroness who had
 not only impoverished her estates by hen
 contributions to the suffering, but who
 left her own home and went down in
 to the worst of the misery until pros
 trated with fever, then reviving and
 toiling on until prostrated by the small
 pox. She had come home to get little
 strength, and in a few days she was
 going down again to the suffering dis
 tricts, and she commissioned me to exc
 cute in America literary enterprise by
 which she expects with her pen mort
 money, all of which is to go for bread
 to those who lack it. Then there art
 the Bobrinskies. They are of the nobil
 ity-not only the nobility of earth, bu
 the nobility of heaven.
 THE NOBILITY OF KINDNESS.
 You know we have in America cer
 tain names which are synonyms fol
 benevolence-George Peabody, James
 Lenox, William E. Dodge, MT. Slater
 and so on. What their names mean il
 America, Bobrinski means in Russia