LIFE IN A RUSSIAN VILLAGE ON one side of the one street of our village, cottages stand side by side, of wood, one-storied, each with an outhouse, equal to itself; on the other side are somewhat larger dwellings in little gardens. It is 6 P.M. and the cows are coming home. A white cow that always leads the line marches down the centre of the roadway over the rough cobble stones, a yellow-haired child laughingly threatens it with a stick, disturbing rather the dignity of the herdsman, a boy of ten in long boots and a red shirt, than the self-possession of the beast. At the end of the rows of houses the road dips to a wooden bridge across a little river, wherein all the folks bathe in the long summer days. Close to the bridge on the banks of the weedy stream is the cemetery. The wooden crosses bear no names. My companion says it is cheap to be buried here. In Petersburg, forty miles away, it costs you 200 roubles for a nice place in a good cemetery, besides a rouble or two for the gravedigger. A cheerful youth, though he does read mathematics and classics and sciences without number in the Gymnase at the capital, and takes a morbid interest in comparative necrology. Cheerful too are the peasants on this July Sunday. The unmarried girls have their hair plaited down their backs, and they and their married sisters with head kerchiefs wear gaily coloured gowns, and bow politely to one another, and talk and laugh, and heartily enjoy the day of rest in the middle of the hay-cutting season. for the most part boast good black coats, and embroidered cotton shirts, and excellent long boots, often of polished leather, and always with concertina-like crinklings at the ankles. As much as 12 roubles or 25 shillings is often paid for a pair of such boots. But this, of course, is their holiday attire, in which they walk past the house of the head man, where a notice above the door proclaims the fact that taxes are received. That such payments do not engender feelings of discontent and resentment against the Czar, is amply proved by an incident which occurred this morning in church. In the Greek, as in the Roman and Protestant Churches, a prayer for the royal family forms a part of the ordinary service, but the Greek priest also reads out the names of persons to be prayed for, which are written on slips of paper, and handed up by members of the congregation. Such names are generally those of deceased members of private persons' VOL. XXXV-No. 207 The men 3 H families, but to-day the late Emperor Alexander the Second, his present Majesty, and several other princes were prayed for over and above the statutory prayers, by the request of someone in the church. Nor has the emancipation which the late Emperor effected terminated the satisfactory relations which often previously existed between lord and serf. At nightfall bands of singing peasants marched along the roads, the women wearing ribbons or gifts of the like nature, and the men with money presents in their pockets, from their former master, who on this his name day has been congratulated in person by all his old serfs, not one of whom had gone empty away. The sun, sinking below the horizon, on the vast and somewhat monotonous plain, left behind it an apparently contented village in Makarief. There was once more wood around it, and the peasants say too much was cut down, that the wife of the landlord might see the dome of the church, five miles off, from her bedroom window. But now that one-third of the commune land is lying fallow, when once the hay is in, the peasants will be glad to fell more forest, and burn the roots, and bring more of the landlords' land under cultivation, for they either get the wood gratis, or a sufficient money payment, in return for their pains. • Who The big brawny peasant sitting on the bench with his cap in his hand is called 'the Baron,' and the title is hereditary in his family. It seems his grandfather was famous as the possessor of an unequalled appetite, and that his master, who often came to see the serfs dine in the field, would good-humouredly refer to the subject, and generally said, 'Here is our friend who has the appetite of three.' One day, however, the serf replied, 'There is nothing wonderful in that, your excellency.' 'No?' replied the master. 'No, indeed,' rejoined the serf; 'I know a man who eats as much as three hundred.' can that be?' said the astonished master. Now consider, your excellency, if it is not yourself. Are not three hundred slaves working daily, and do you not eat all the produce of their labour?' They work hard, these peasants. My next-door neighbour is a man who makes his own bread, and cultivates enough land to grow all the corn he wants for his family. In the short summer of four months he is up daily at four o'clock, or earlier, and is at work till 9 P.M. Just now he mows the hay in these early hours, and later in the day it dries in the sun, and can be carted into the barn, for at night and in the early morning the grass is wet with dew. By his bad luck my neighbour's children are girls, and too young to help him. A boy of ten years could have watered the horse and have helped in various ways, but of his five girls only one can assist at all. He prays devoutly for a son or two, for just now he works till 11 P.M. every night, and sometimes the stress and simultaneous pressure of different agricultural operations force him to rise again two hours after midnight. He can rest in the long winter, when the snowdrift rises up above his windows and his wife is busy spinning, but most of the villagers cannot. They are busy gathering wood for use and for sale, and many of them take their horses into Petersburg, and become cabmen. And on bitter nights, when the breath freezes instantaneously in moustache and beard, it has happened that one or two of our peasants have been frozen on the little boxes of their diminutive carriages. A dram too deep, a drowsy nod, a few minutes' sleep, and the benumbed driver awakes no more. Just now it is hard to believe that such a fate can have overtaken any one, for the thermometer marks 78° in the shade, and in the small rooms of a wooden cottage the heat is intensely felt. The neighbouring landlord wants to get his work done, and his agent is offering a rouble and a rouble and a half a day, but Ivan must look after his own field first, and just now it is a struggle with all to get through their work. Where the soil is ungrateful, as it is here, a landlord, when he has paid all expenses, finds a very small balance of profit left in his pocket. But for the forests, few estates around us would pay expenses. The admirable work on Russia of Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace continues to be the standard authority on that country, and not one of its successors has in any way approached its thoroughness and excellence. There is only one question on which I should venture with extreme diffidence to express an opinion at all at variance with that of Sir Donald Wallace, who, however, on this point wrote so soon after the emancipation as to make it impossible for him, as he expressly stated, to fully estimate its effects. I think the losses of the landlords have proved greater and more universal. He says many were, no doubt, ruined at the time, but the emancipation only showed them that they were ruined. Well, Russia at the moment occupies a foremost place in the comity of nations. With an immense army and a growing navy, with improved communications, with a government perhaps adapted to her needs, and a generally contented and patriotic population, she preserves the peace throughout Northern Europe and Asia, and in the older continent continually manifests that tendency to extend her frontiers which is the outward and visible sign of vigorous youth and of growing power. Her subjects, as a whole, it may safely be said, are contented, for they certainly have no sympathy with the small party of Anarchists. Here we have a picture of a great and prosperous Power. But its credit notes are inconvertible. It promises the holder 3s. 2d. for every rouble note. The holder cannot get any money out of the Government for his paper, and the foreigner will only give him 2s. 1d. It may certainly be said, from this point of view, that the Government is not solvent. If, then, any financial or political crisis compelled the Russian Government to pay off all its debts, reducing its army, neglecting to add to its navy, and ceasing to extend its dominions, for this purpose, that Government might reasonably consider that the events which showed that it was ruined, actually caused its ruin. And such was the case with many, perhaps with the majority, of the landlords. They may have been embarrassed, generally were, but they kept their heads above water and held their own. So has the Government been embarrassed, and yet it more than holds its own. It is not, I think, a sufficient answer to assert that the landlords really profited, because, when once they learned that they were ruined, they took to occupations and began to occupy positions which they had formerly scorned. It might be good for the Russian Government to place its affairs on a sound financial basis, but the process, involving as it must a large reduction in the army, would inevitably result in its descent from the proud position it now occupies in the world. In short, I think that the experience of the thirty-two and a half years which have elapsed since the emancipation shows that the landlords, as a class, suffered enormously. The redemption money paid by the State was soon spent, too often abroad and in riotous living (whence arose the still existing impression that Russians are always rich), and the second and third generations occupy a very different position from that of their forefathers. To return to our village. To-day I paid some visits. The peasants receive with much natural grace and hospitality, and exhibit with pride the kitchen stove on the top of which they sleep in winter, and the room facing the street in which they breakfast and dine. On the walls are generally pictures of the Czar and of the royal family, the outhouses adjoin the back of the cottage, and the eternal samovar is the chief feature of the interior domestic economy. Sugar is looked on as rather a luxury, though all use it. Generally a lump is dipped in the tea, and sucked from time to time by the poor, or dissolved wholesale by the rich. It is an exciting occupation to follow the indefinite branch of the imperfect aspect, or the semelfactive perfect aspect of unity of a Russian irregular verb, from its birth in the back of the mouth, around a rolling lump of sugar, past a hedge of white teeth, through a pair of half-opened lips, till it strikes upon the ear with all the full majesty of the most complicatedly compound and irregularly perplexing part of speech that ever was invented since the time of the Tower of Babel. The milk is placed on the table in an earthenware pot, and a dipper floats upon the thick white fluid. One objection to the dipper is that you can hardly use it without putting your fingers in the milk; a greater objection is that the same thing happens to other people's fingers. Outside the window grow some tall shrubs, probably not less than six feet high. The housewife says, 'The hares ate the top off that one in the winter'! They subsist upon the tops of such shrubs. as preserve any leaves at any altitude above the snow line. She spoke quite seriously. There is not a single individual in our village who would laugh at a stranger. This is as true as any general statement can be, but they do laugh to this day at the mistake of an Englishman who long ago came on a visit from the capital and was introduced to a ring of village maidens, who were dancing quadrilles in the gloaming on the boarded floor of the bridge across the river. He was trying to learn Russian and anxious to say something on all occasions. But when he shook hands with the leader of the dance in the middle of the ring, his newly acquired words got mixed in his head, and meaning to apologise for his gloved hand he said, 'I hope you will all excuse me for wearing trousers'! We Just now, oddly enough, we awake at 5 A.M. to the sound of the trumpet. Long lines of waggons roll along the street. Yesterday two carriages emblazoned with imperial crowns passed by, and two Circassians witched our little world with wondrous horsemanship. One of them threw down a nut and picked it up as he galloped past, to the delight of several women who were—and I think the soldiers knew it-looking on. Officers ride by, maps sticking in their belts. I saw a colonel determining with mathematical accuracy the position. on the chart of a railway station which stared him in the face. take part in these manœuvres. The village has been called on to furnish supplies in nines-nine men, nine horses, nine carts, nine feeds of forage, and by the literal way in which the starost is proceeding, I should imagine, nine cabbages, nine beetroots, nine samovars, and nine lumps of sugar. He called his people about him as he sat on a bench in our 'boulevard '—the word is well enough, for he himself calls it a 'gulvar.' He has been to Petersburg and knows what he is about.-First of all, nine men. Eight come forward, and saying they have cut and dried their hay, volunteer for service; but a ninth cannot be found. They draw lots, and chance decides who shall be sacrificed for his country. I left them, for I saw it was nine o'clock, and I had to be at home if I wanted any tea. You cannot ring the bell and get tea when you want it in our village. The setting of the samovar is a function, and that you do not really enter into the spirit of the ceremony is obvious. from the fact that you cannot drink tea scalding hot, nor touch with the tips of your hardened fingers the outside of the glass containing the fluid, which your neighbours swallow as easily as a glass of cold water. It is said that the long cold winter develops this love of intensely hot drinks. I insist on a boiled egg for tea, as some kind of compensation for a three o'clock dinner. I did not eat my first egg without learning something, for I left it uncracked except at the end whence its contents had been extracted. It seems the whole shell must be crushed. Why? Why! because if it is not, the hen will never lay another egg! But in fact excellent reasons exist for complying with the local custom in this behalf. Consider for a moment that this empty egg shell goes out into the yard, and that those gentle cannibals, the farmyard fowls, like egg shells, which are |