rest, our fields were black, dusty. They were like the road. From all our land we took nothing-nothing!"

This was not one man telling the story of the fields of one village. In him thirty millions of people were speaking, and were telling the story of a third of European Russia.

These people were living solely on that which is given them, and this comes from two main sources-from the Government, and from the Red Cross and Zemstvo funds. The Government grants monthly to each person under eighteen and over fifty-nine, forty pounds of flour. All between these ages, and infants under one, get nothing. Other rules bar many families from receiving the Government allowance, and to aid these families is the chief effort of the Red Cross and Zemstvo relief. Daily, in such villages as have Red Cross kitchens, there are given to each child and each old person of these families a pound of black bread and a small portion of soup, made of cabbage and potatoes, strengthened with shreds of meat or a little oil. Again nothing for the adults.

We asked about the weeds beside the cow-shed, and she told us that when the too-late rain had come, weeds had sprung up over their fields; and these they had carefully gathered, as all the village had done. That heap of weeds was all that their land had yielded them. They had thought these weeds would keep their cow through the winter, but long ago they had sold her, and sold all else. And now they had left only the weeds.

We had heard in Moscow of a strange -strange to us- -use the peasants of the hungry villages were making of weeds; and we questioned her further.

'Yes, we have done that," she said. "But the bread we got from the seed of the weeds, it made us all sick."

We went from the dusky room out into the street's blinding light, and our eyes were blinded not only by the sun. In the street had gathered a great crowd, in coats of sheepskin and of patched and repatched homespun; and since we were obviously from that vague, beyond-theirvillage world to which their voices could not reach, from which alone could come help, they followed us about, all the while we were in their village and begged us to send them bread.

In the next home conditions were much as in the first-and in the next,

and the next, and the next. Nowhere was there as much as a pound of bread for a person. And then we came into a house where lived a family of five-a father and mother in the forties, two sons, one nineteen and the other twentytwo, and a daughter of thirteen. Of these five the Government's regulations gave aid to but one-the girl. But her monthly portion, given on the first, had long ago been eaten. We asked on what they were now living; and they told us that each day the girl went forth to beg from their neighbors-such fortunate neighbors as out of a family of five received aid for three, or for six out of ten.

"And they give to you?" I marveled. They did. Some a bite of bread, some a bit of potato from their Red Cross soup. And these little fragments she carried home.

That a famishing people could divide with those not of their kin the little on which they starved-this we could hardly believe. It was the first time we had met the fact. But the priest told us that several families in his village were living on this charity of starvation-and afterward we met the fact over and over again. Sympathy ånd generosity, these are at the foundation of the Russian peasant.