"Russian Rambles" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hapgood Isabel F.)

X. A JOURNEY ON THE VOLGA

I.

We had seen the Russian haying on the estate of Count Tolstoy. We were to be initiated into the remaining processes of the agricultural season in that famous "black earth zone" which has been the granary of Europe from time immemorial, but which is also, alas! periodically the seat of dire famine.

It was July when we reached Nizhni Novgorod, on our way to an estate on the Volga, in this "black earth" grainfield, vast as the whole of France; but the flag of opening would not be run up for some time to come. The Fair quarter of the town was still in its state of ten months' hibernation, under padlock and key, and the normal town, effective as it was, with its white Kremlin crowning the turfed and terraced heights, possessed few charms to detain us. We embarked for Kazan.

If Kazan is an article in the creed of all Russians, whether they have ever seen it or not, Matushka Volga (dear Mother Volga) is a complete system of faith. Certainly her services in building up and binding together the empire merit it, though the section thus usually referred to comprises only the stretch between Nizhni Novgorod and Astrakhan, despite its historical and commercial importance above the former town.

But Kazan! A stay there of a day and a half served to dispel our illusions. We were deceived in our expectations as to the once mighty capital of the imperial Tatar khans. The recommendations of our Russian friends, the glamour of history which had bewitched us, the hope of the Western for something Oriental,-all these elements had combined to raise our expectations in a way against which our sober senses and previous experience should have warned us. It seemed to us merely a flourishing and animated Russian provincial town, whose Kremlin was eclipsed by that of Moscow, and whose university had instructed, but not graduated, Count Tolstoy, the novelist. The bazaar under arcades, the popular market in the open square, the public garden, the shops,-all were but a repetition of similar features in other towns, somewhat magnified to the proportions befitting the dignity of the home port of the Ural Mountains and Siberia.

The Tatar quarter alone seemed to possess the requisite mystery and "local color." Here whole streets of tiny shops, ablaze with rainbow-hued leather goods, were presided over by taciturn, olive-skinned brothers of the Turks, who appeared almost handsome when seen thus in masses, with opportunities for comparison. Hitherto we had thought of the Tatars only as the old-clothes dealers, peddlers, horse-butchers, and waiters of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Here the dignity of the prosperous merchants, gravely recommending their really well-dressed, well-sewed leather wares, bespoke our admiration.

The Tatar women, less easily seen, glided along the uneven pavements now and then, smoothly, but still in a manner to permit a glimpse of short, square feet incased in boots flowered with gay hues upon a green or rose-colored ground, and reaching to the knee. They might have been houris of beauty, but it was difficult to classify them, veiled as they were, and screened as to head and shoulders by striped green kaftans of silk, whose long sleeves depended from the region of their ears, and whose collar rested on the brow. What we could discern was that their black eyes wandered like the eyes of unveiled women, and that they were coquettishly conscious of our glances, though we were of their own sex.

We found nothing especially striking among the churches, unless one might reckon the Tatar mosques in the list; and, casting a last glance at Sumbeka's curious and graceful tower, we hired a cabman to take us to the river, seven versts away.

We turned our backs upon Kazan without regret, in the fervid heat of that midsummer morning. We did not shake its dust from our feet. When dust is ankle-deep that is not very feasible. It rose in clouds, as we met the long lines of Tatar carters, transporting flour and other merchandise to and from the wharves across the "dam" which connects the town, in summer low water, with Mother Volga. In spring floods Matushka Volga threatens to wash away the very walls of the Kremlin, and our present path is under water.

Fate had favored us with a clever cabman. His shaggy little horse was as dusty in hue as his own coat,-a most unusual color for coat of either Russian horse or izvostchik. The man's armyak was bursting at every seam, not with plenty, but, since extremes meet, with hard times, which are the chronic complaint of Kazan, so he affirmed. He was gentle and sympathetic, like most Russian cabmen, and he beguiled our long drive with shrewd comments on the Russian and Tatar inhabitants and their respective qualities.

"The Tatars are good people," he said; "very clean,-cleaner than Russians; very quiet and peaceable citizens. There was a time when they were not quiet. That was ten years ago, during the war with Turkey. They were disturbed. The Russians said that it was a holy war; the Tatars said so, too, and wished to fight for their brethren of the Moslem faith. But the governor was not a man to take fright at that. He summoned the chief men among them before him. 'See here,' says he. 'With me you can be peaceable with better conscience. If you permit your people to be turbulent, I will pave the dam with the heads of Tatars. The dam is long. Allah is my witness. Enough. Go!' And it came to nothing, of course. No; it was only a threat, though they knew that he was a strong man in rule. Why should he wish to do that, really, even if they were not Orthodox? A man is born with his religion as with his skin. The Orthodox live at peace with the Tatars. And the Tatars are superior to the Russians in this, also, that they all stick by each other; whereas a Russian, Hospodi pomilui! [Lord have mercy] thinks of himself alone, which is a disadvantage," said my humble philosopher.

We found that we had underrated the power of our man's little horse, and had arrived at the river an hour and a half before the steamer was appointed to sail. It should be there lading, however, and we decided to go directly on board and wait in comfort. We gave patient Vanka liberal "tea-money." Hard times were evidently no fiction so far as he was concerned, and we asked if he meant to spend it on vodka, which elicited fervent asseverations of teetotalism, as he thrust his buckskin pouch into his breast.

Descending in the deep dust, with a sense of gratitude that it was not mixed with rain, we ran the gauntlet of the assorted peddlers stationed on both sides of the long descent with stocks of food, soap, white felt boots, gay sashes, coarse leather slippers too large for human wear, and other goods, and reached the covered wharf. The steamer was not there, but we took it calmly, and asked no questions-for a space.

We whiled away the time by chaffering with the persistent Tatar venders for things which we did not want, and came into amazed possession of some of them. This was a tribute to our powers of bargaining which had rarely been paid even when we had been in earnest. We contrived to avoid the bars of yellow "egg soap" by inquiring for one of the marvels of Kazan,-soap made from mare's milk. An amused apothecary had already assured us that it was a product of the too fertile brain of Baedeker, not of the local soap factories. May Baedeker himself, some day, reap a similar harvest of mirth and astonishment from the sedate Tatars, who can put mare's milk to much better use as a beverage!

In the hope of obtaining a conversation-lesson in Tatar, we bought a Russo-Tatar grammar, warranted to deliver over all the secrets of that gracefully curved language in the usual scant array of pages. But the peddler immediately professed as profound ignorance of Tatar as he had of Russian a few moments before, when requested to abate his exorbitant demands for the pamphlet.

By the time we had exhausted these resources one o'clock had arrived. The steamer had not. The office clerk replied to all inquiries with the languid national "saytchas" which the dictionary defines as meaning "immediately," but which experience proves to signify, "Be easy; any time this side of eternity,-if perfectly convenient!" Under the pressure of increasingly vivacious attacks, prompted by hunger, he finally condescended to explain that the big mail steamer, finding too little water in the channel, had "sat down on a sand-bank," and that two other steamers were trying to pull her off. "She might be along at three o'clock, or later,-or some time." It began to be apparent to us why the success of the Fair depends, in great measure, on the amount of water in the river.

Our first meal of bread and tea had been eaten at seven o'clock, and we had counted upon breakfasting on the steamer, where some of the best public cooking in the country, especially in the matter of fish, is to be found. It was now two o'clock. The town was distant. The memory of the ducks, the size of a plover, and other things in proportion, in which our strenuous efforts had there resulted, did not tempt us to return. Russians have a way of slaying chickens and other poultry almost in the shell, to serve as game.

Accordingly, we organized a search expedition among the peddlers, and in the colony of rainbow-hued shops planted in a long street across the heads of the wharves, and filled chiefly with Tatars and coarse Tatar wares. For the equivalent of seventeen cents we secured a quart of rich cream, half a dozen hard-boiled eggs, a couple of pounds of fine raspberries, and a large fresh wheaten roll. These we ate in courses, as we perched on soap-boxes and other unconventional seats, surrounded by smoked fish, casks of salted cucumbers, festoons of dried mushrooms, "cartwheels" of sour black bread, and other favorite edibles, in the open-fronted booths. A delicious banquet it was,-one of those which recur to the memory unbidden when more elaborate meals have been forgotten.

Returning to the wharf with a fresh stock of patience, we watched the river traffic and steamers of rival lines, which had avoided sand-banks, as they took in their fuel supplies of refuse petroleum from the scows anchored in mid-stream, and proceeded on their voyage to Astrakhan. Some wheelbarrow steamers, bearing familiar names, " Niagara " and the like, pirouetted about in awkward and apparently aimless fashion.

Passengers who seemed to be better informed than we as to the ways of steamers began to make their appearance. A handsome officer deposited his red-cotton-covered traveling-pillow and luggage on the dock and strolled off, certain that no one would unlock his trunk or make way with his goods. The trunk, not unusual in style, consisted of a red-and-white tea-cloth, whose knotted corners did not wholly repress the exuberance of linen and other effects through the bulging edges.

A young Tatar, endowed with india-rubber capabilities in the way of attitudes, and with a volubility surely unrivaled in all taciturn Kazan, chatted interminably with a young Russian woman, evidently the wife of a petty shopkeeper. They bore the intense heat with equal equanimity, but their equanimity was clad in oddly contrasting attire. The woman looked cool and indifferent buttoned up in a long wadded pelisse, with a hot cotton kerchief tied close over ears, under chin, and tucked in at the neck. The Tatar squatted on his haunches, folded in three nearly equal parts. A spirally ribbed flat fez of dark blue velvet, topped with a black silk tassel, adorned his cleanly shaven head. His shirt, of the coarsest linen, was artistically embroidered in black, yellow, and red silks and green linen thread in Turanian designs, and ornamented with stripes and diamonds of scarlet cotton bestowed unevenly in unexpected places. It lay open on his dusky breast, and fell unconfined over full trousers of home-made dark blue linen striped with red, like the gussets under the arms of his white shirt. The trousers were tucked into high boots, slightly wrinkled at the instep, with an inset of pebbled horsehide, frosted green in hue, at the heels. This green leather was a part of their religion, the Tatars told me, but what part they would not reveal. As the soles were soft, like socks, he wore over his boots a pair of stiff leather slippers, which could be easily discarded on entering the mosque, in compliance with the Moslem law requiring the removal of foot-gear.

Several peasants stood about silently, patiently, wrapped in their sheepskin coats. Apparently they found this easier than carrying them, and they were ready to encounter the chill night air in the open wooden bunks of the third-class, or on the floor of the fourth-class cabin. The soiled yellow leather was hooked close across their breasts, as in winter. An occasional movement displayed the woolly interior of the tulup's short, full ballet skirt attached to the tight-fitting body. The peasants who thus tranquilly endured the heat of fur on a midsummer noon would, did circumstances require it, bear the piercing cold of winter with equal calmness clad in cotton shirts, or freeze to death on sentry duty without a murmur. They were probably on their way to find work during the harvest and earn a few kopeks, and very likely would return to their struggling families as poor as they went. As we watched this imperturbable crowd, we became infected with their spirit of unconcern, and entered into sympathy with the national saytchas-a case of atmospheric influence.

At last the steamer arrived, none the worse for its encounter with the bar. Usually, the mail steamers halt three hours-half-merchandise steamers four hours-at Kazan and other important towns on the Volga, affording hasty travelers an opportunity to make a swift survey in a drosky; but on this occasion one hour was made to suffice, and at last we were really off on our way to the estate down the river where we were to pay our long-promised visit.

We were still at a reach of the river where the big steamer might sit down on another reef, and the men were kept on guard at the bow, with hardly an intermission, gauging the depth of the water with their striped poles, to guide the helmsman by their monotonous calls: "Vosim!" "Schest-s-polovino-o-o-iu!" "Sim!" (Eight! Six and a half! Seven!) They had a little peculiarity of pronunciation which was very pleasing. And we soon discovered that into shallower water than five and a half quarters we might not venture.

The river was extremely animated above the mouth of the Kama, the great waterway from the mines and forests of the Ural and Siberia. Now and then, the men on a float heavily laden with iron bars, which was being towed to the Fair at Nizhni Novgorod, would shout a request that we would slacken speed, lest they be swamped with our swell. Huge rafts of fine timber were abundant, many with small chapel-like structures on them, which were not chapels, however. Cattle steamers passed, the unconfined beasts staring placidly over the low guards of the three decks, and uttering no sound. We had already learned that the animals are as quiet as the people, in Russia, the Great Silent Land. Very brief were our halts at the small landings. The villagers, who had come down with baskets of fresh rolls and berries and bottles of cream, to supply hungry passengers whose means or inclination prevented their eating the steamer food, had but scant opportunity to dispose of their perishable wares.

As the evening breeze freshened, the perfume of the hayfields was wafted from the distant shores in almost overpowering force. The high right bank, called the Hills, and the low left shore, known as the Forests, sank into half-transparent vagueness, which veiled the gray log-built villages with their tiny windows, and threw into relief against the evening sky only the green roofs and blue domes of the churches, surmounted by golden crosses, which gleamed last of all in the vanishing rays of sunset. A boatload of peasants rowing close in shore; a red-shirted solitary figure straying along the water's edge; tiny sea-gulls darting and dipping in the waves around the steamer; a vista up some wide-mouthed affluent; and a great peaceful stillness brooding over all,-such were the happenings, too small for incidents, which accorded perfectly with the character of the Volga. For the Volga cannot be compared with the Rhine or the Hudson in castles or scenery. It has, instead, a grand, placid charm of its own, imperial, indefinable, and sweet. One yields to it, and subscribes to the Russian faith in the grand river.

No one seemed to know how much of the lost time would be made up. Were it spring, when Mother Volga runs from fifty to a hundred and fifty miles wide, taking the adjoining country into her broad embrace, and steamers steer a bee-line course to their landings, the officers might have been able to say at what hour we should reach our destination. As it was, they merely reiterated the characteristic "Ne znaem" (We don't know), which possesses plural powers of irritation when uttered in the conventional half-drawl. Perhaps they really did not know. Owing to a recent decree in the imperial navy, officers who have served a certain number of years without having accomplished a stipulated amount of sea service are retired. Since the Russian war vessels are not many, while the Naval Academy continues to turn out a large batch of young officers every year, the opportunities for effecting the requisite sea service are limited. The officers who are retired, in consequence, seek positions on the Volga steamers, which are sometimes commanded by a rear-admiral, in the imperial uniform, which he is allowed to retain, in addition to receiving a grade. But if one chances upon them during their first season on the river, their information is not equal to their fine appearance, since Mother Volga must be studied in her caprices, and navigation is open only, on the average, between the 12th of April and the 24th of November. Useless to interrogate the old river dogs among the subordinates. The "We don't know" is even more inveterate with them, and it is reinforced with the just comment, "We are not the masters."

Knowing nothing, in the general uncertainty, except that we must land some time during the night, we were afraid to make ourselves comfortable even to the extent of unpacking sheets to cool off the velvet divans, which filled two sides of our luxurious cabin. When we unbolted the movable panels from the slatted door and front wall, to establish a draft of fresh air from the window, a counter-draft was set up of electric lights, supper clatter, cigarette smoke, and chatter, renewed at every landing with the fresh arrivals. We resolved to avoid these elegant mail steamers in the future, and patronize the half-merchandise boats of the same line, which are not much slower, and possess the advantage of staterooms opening on a corridor, not on the saloon, and are fitted with skylights, so that one can have fresh air and quiet sleep.

At four o'clock in the morning we landed. The local policeman, whose duty it is to meet steamers, gazed at us with interest. The secret of his meditations we learned later. He thought of offering us his services. "They looked like strangers, but talked Russian," he said. The combination was too much for him, and, seeing that we were progressing well in our bargain for a conveyance, he withdrew, and probably solved the riddle with the aid of the postboy.

The estate for which we were bound lay thirty-five versts distant; but fearing that we might reach it too early if we were to start at once, I ordered an equipage for six o'clock. I was under the impression that the man from the posting-house had settled it for us that we required a pair of horses, attached to whatever he thought fit, and that I had accepted his dictation. The next thing to do, evidently, was to adopt the Russian stop-gap of tea.

The wharfinger, who occupied a tiny tenement on one end of the dock, supplied us with a bubbling samovar, sugar, and china, since we were not traveling in strictly Russian style, with a fragile-nosed teapot and glasses. We got out our tea, steeped and sipped it, nibbling at a bit of bread, in that indifferent manner which one unconsciously acquires in Russia. It is only by such experience that one comes to understand the full-or rather scanty-significance of that puzzling and oft-recurring phrase in Russian novels, "drinking tea."

As we were thus occupied in one of the cells, furnished with a table and two hard stuffed benches, to accommodate waiting passengers, our postboy thrust his head in at the door and began the subject of the carriage all over again. I repeated my orders. He said, "Kharasho" (Good), and disappeared. We dallied over our tea. We watched the wharfinger's boys trying to drown themselves in a cranky boat, like the young male animals of all lands; we listened to their shrill little songs; we counted the ducks, gazed at the peasants assembled on the brow of the steep hill above us, on which the town was situated, and speculated about the immediate future, until the time fixed and three quarters of an hour more had elapsed. The wharfinger's reply to my impatient questions was an unvarying apathetic "We don't know," and, spurred to action by this, I set out to find the posting-house.

It was not far away, but my repeated and vigorous knocks upon the door of the izba (cottage), ornamented with the imperial eagle and the striped pole, received no response. I pushed open the big gate of the courtyard alongside, and entered. Half the court was roofed over with thatch. In the far corner, divorced wagon bodies, running-gear, and harnesses lay heaped on the earth. A horse, which was hitched to something unsubstantial among those fragments, came forward to welcome me. A short row of wagon members which had escaped divorce, and were united in wheeling order, stood along the high board fence. In one of them, a rough wooden cart, shaped somewhat like a barrel sawed in two lengthwise, pillowed on straw, but with his legs hanging down in an uncomfortable attitude, lay my faithless postboy (he was about forty years of age) fast asleep. The neighboring vehicle, which I divined to be the one intended for us, was in possession of chickens. A new-laid egg bore witness to their wakefulness and industry.

While I was engaged in an endeavor to rouse my should-be coachman, by tugging at his sleeve and pushing his boots in the most painful manner I could devise, a good-looking peasant woman made her tardy appearance at the side door of the adjoining izba, and seemed to enjoy the situation in an impartial, impersonal way. The horse thrust his muzzle gently into his master's face and roused him for me, and, in return, was driven away.

I demanded an explanation. Extracted by bits in conversational spirals, it proved to be that he had decided that the carriage needed three horses, which he had known all along; and, chiefly, that he had desired to sleep upon a little scheme for exploiting the strangers. How long he had intended to pursue his slumberous meditations it is impossible to say.

He dragged me through all the mazes of that bargain once more. Evidently, bargaining was of even stricter etiquette than my extensive previous acquaintance had led me to suspect; and I had committed the capital mistake of not complying with this ancestral custom in the beginning. I agreed to three horses, and stipulated, on my side, that fresh straw should replace the chickens' nest, and that we should set out at once,-not saytchas but sooner, "this very minute."

I turned to go. A fresh difficulty arose. He would not go unless I would pay for three relays. He brought out the government regulations and amendments,-all that had been issued during the century, I should think. He stood over me while I read them, and convinced myself that his "Yay Bogu" (God is my witness) was accurately placed. The price of relays was, in reality, fixed by law; but though over-affirmation had now aroused my suspicions, in my ignorance of the situation I could not espy the loophole of trickery in which I was to be noosed, and I agreed once more. More quibbling. He would not stir unless he were allowed to drive the same horses the whole distance, though paid for three relays, because all the horses would be away harvesting, and so forth and so on. Goaded to assert myself in some manner, to put an end to these interminable hagglings, I asserted what I did not know.

"Prince X. never pays for these relays," I declared boldly.

"Oh, no, he does n't," replied the man, with cheerful frankness. "But you must, or I'll not go."

That settled it; I capitulated once more.

We had omitted to telegraph to our friends, partly in order to save them the trouble of sending a carriage, partly because we were thirsting for "experiences." It began to look as though our thirst was to be quenched in some degree, since we were in this man's power as to a vehicle, and it might be true that we should not be able to obtain any other in the town, or any horses in the villages, if indeed there were any villages. Fortified by another volley of "Yay Bogu" of triumphant fervor, we survived a second wait. At last, near nine o'clock, we were able to pack ourselves and our luggage.

The body of our tarantas, made, for the sake of lightness, of woven elm withes, and varnished dark brown, was shaped not unlike a baby carriage. Such a wagon body costs about eight dollars in Kazan, where great numbers of them are made. It was set upon stout, unpainted running-gear, guiltless of springs, in cat's-cradle fashion. The step was a slender iron stirrup, which revolved in its ring with tantalizing ease. It was called a pletuschka, and the process of entering it resembled vaulting on horseback.

Our larger luggage was tied on behind with ropes, in precarious fashion. The rest we took inside and deposited at our feet. As there was no seat, we flattened ourselves out on the clean hay, and practiced Delsartean attitudes of languor. Our three horses were harnessed abreast. The reins were made in part of rope; so were the traces. Our yamtschik had donned his regulation coat over his red shirt, and sat unblenchingly through the heat. All preliminaries seemed to be settled at last. I breathed a sigh of relief, as we halted at the posting-house to pay our dues in advance, and I received several pounds of copper coin in change, presumably that I might pay the non-existent relays.

The troika set off with spirit, and we flattered ourselves that we should not be long on the road. This being a county town, there were some stone official buildings in addition to the cathedral, of which we caught a glimpse in the distance. But our road lay through a suburb of log cabins, through a large gate in the wattled town fence, and out upon the plain.

For nearly five hours we drove through birch forests, over rolling downs, through a boundless ocean of golden rye, diversified by small patches of buckwheat, oats, millet, and wheat. But wheat thrives better in the adjoining government, and many peasants, we are told, run away from pressing work and good wages at hand to harvest where they will get white bread to eat, and return penniless.

Here and there, the small, weather-beaten image of some saint, its face often indistinguishable through stress of storms, and shielded by a rough triangular penthouse, was elevated upon a pole, indicating the spot where prayers are said for the success of the harvest. Corn-flowers, larkspur, convolvulus, and many other flowers grew profusely enough among the grain to come under the head of weeds.

The transparent air allowed us vast vistas of distant blue hills and nearer green valleys, in which nestled villages under caps of thatch, encircled by red-brown fences cleverly wattled of long boughs. In one hollow we passed through a village of the Tchuvashi, a Turkish or Finnish tribe, which was stranded all along the middle Volga in unrecorded antiquity, during some of the race migrations from the teeming plateaux of Asia. The village seemed deserted. Only a few small children and grannies had been left at home by the harvesters, and they gazed curiously at us, aroused to interest by the jingling harness with its metal disks, and the bells clanging merrily from the apex of the wooden arch which rose above the neck of our middle horse.

The grain closed in upon us. We plucked some ears as we passed, and found them ripe and well filled. The plain seemed as trackless as a forest, and our postboy suspected, from time to time, that he had lost his way among the narrow roads. A few peasant men whom we encountered at close quarters took off their hats, but without servility, and we greeted them with the customary good wishes for a plentiful harvest, "Bog v pomozh" (God help), or with a bow. The peasant women whom we met rarely took other notice of us than to stare, and still more rarely did they salute first. They gazed with instinctive distrust, as women of higher rank are wont to do at a stranger of their own sex.

Although the grain was planted in what seemed to be a single vast field, belonging to one estate, it was in reality the property of many different peasants, as well as of some proprietors. Each peasant had marked his plot with a cipher furrow when he plowed, and the outlines had been preserved by the growing grain. The rich black soil of the fallow land, and strips of turf separating sections, relieved the monotony of this waving sea of gold.

The heat was intense. In our prone position, we found it extremely fatiguing to hold umbrellas. We had recourse, therefore, to the device practiced by the mountaineers of the Caucasus, who, in common with the Spaniards, believe that what will keep out cold will also keep out heat. We donned our heavy wadded pelisses. The experiment was a success. We arrived cool and tranquil, in the fierce heat, at the estate of our friends, and were greeted with fiery reproaches for not having allowed them to send one of their fifteen or twenty carriages for us. But we did not repent, since our conduct had secured for us that novel ride and a touch of our coveted "experience," in spite of the strain of our thirty hours' vigil and the jolts of the springless vehicle.

Then we discovered the exact extent of our yamtschik's trick. He had let us off on fairly easy terms, getting not quite half more than his due. By the regular route, we might really have had three relays and made better time, had we been permitted. By the short cut which our wily friend had selected, but one change was possible. This left the price of two changes to be credited to his financial ability (in addition to the tea-money of gratitude, which came in at the end, all the same), and the price of the one which he would not make. And, as I was so thoughtless as not to hire him to carry away those pounds of "relay" copper, I continued to be burdened with it until I contrived to expend it on peasant manufactures. The postboy bore the reputation of being a very honest fellow, I learned,-something after the pattern of the charming cabby who drove us to Count Tolstoy's estate.

The village, like most Russian villages, was situated on a small river, in a valley. It consisted of two streets: one running parallel with the river, the other at right angles to it, on the opposite bank. The connecting bridge had several large holes in it, on the day of our arrival, which were mended, a few days later, with layers of straw and manure mixed with earth. We continued, during the whole period of our stay, to cross the bridge, instead of going round it, as we had been advised to do with Russian bridges, by Russians, in the certainty that, if we came near drowning through its fault, it would surely furnish us with an abundance of straws to catch at.

In one corner of the settlement, a petty bourgeois,-there is no other word to define him,-the son of a former serf, and himself born a serf, had made a mill-pond and erected cloth-mills. His "European" clothes (long trousers, sack coat, Derby hat) suited him as ill as his wife's gaudy silk gown, and Sunday bonnet in place of the kerchief usual with the lower classes, suited her face and bearing. He was a quiet, unassuming man, but he was making over for himself a handsome house, formerly the residence of a noble. Probably the money wherewith he had set up in business had been wrung out of his fellow-peasants in the profession of a kulak, or "fist," as the people expressively term peasant usurers.

On the other side of the river stood the church, white-walled, green-roofed, with golden cross, like the average country church, with some weather stains, and here and there a paling missing from the fence. Near at hand was the new schoolhouse, with accommodations for the master, recently erected by our host. Beyond this began the inclosure surrounding the manor house, and including the cottages of the coachmen and the steward with their hemp and garden plots, the stables and carriage houses, the rickyard with its steam threshing machine and driers, and a vast abandoned garden, as well as the gardens in use. The large brick mansion, with projecting wings, had its drawing-rooms at the back, where a spacious veranda opened upon a flower-bordered lawn, terminating in shady acacia walks, and a grove which screened from sight the peasant cottages on the opposite bank of the river. A hedge concealed the vegetable garden, where the village urchins were in the habit of pilfering their beloved cucumbers with perfect impunity, since a wholesome spanking, even though administered by the Elder of the Commune, might result in the spanker's exile to Siberia. Another instance of the manner in which the peasants are protected by the law, in their wrongs as well as their rights, may be illustrated by the case of a load of hay belonging to the owner of the estate, which, entering the village in goodly proportions, is reduced to a few petty armfuls by the time it reaches the barn, because of the handfuls snatched in passing by every man, woman, and child in the place.

No sound of the village reached us in our retreat except the choral songs of the maidens on holiday evenings. We tempted them to the lawn one night, and overcame their bashfulness by money for nuts and apples. The airs which they sang were charming, but their voices were undeniably shrill and nasal, and not always in harmony. We found them as reluctant to dance as had been the peasants at Count Tolstoy's village. Here we established ourselves for the harvest-tide.