teousness is no less common among the peasantry. That they rise and uncover when a superior approaches, is perhaps a relic of servitude; but when one peasant lad meets another on a country road, or when a porter in Moscow meets an acquaintance, he always takes off his cap, and in case of a good friend kisses him. There is, too, a certain amount of deference shown to women. The salutation is always "Brother" or "Sister." All this is so contrary to the careless nod or gruff greeting seen among the common people in most countries that it is one of the first things the traveler remarks in the streets. There are yet two traits which deserve mention-one because it is not without a parallel at home, and the other because it has recently been denied. These are inquisitiveness and restlessness. The peasant has still a nomad nature, which is by no means opposed to a social instinct. His attachment is more to his family than to his village or immediate surroundings. He is ready at any time to move, himself, his house, or the whole village. This may be an inherited disposition, or it may be that with a landscape so flat and uniform as in Russia, and with the surroundings of one village repeating themselves about another, he does not feel the same attachment to locality as in most countries. Under serfdom it was difficult for the peasants to move about, though the villages were often changed from one part of an estate to another, and the masters often found it more advantageous to provide their serfs with passports, and let them go, on condition of their annual payments. Since the emancipation they are constantly moving around. There is every summer a great change of populaup and down the great rivers. They build a bark and load it at one place, go as seamen to the destination, whether Saratof or St. Petersburg, and then by means of their co-operative societies find employment and a livelihood. The chief revenue of the railways from passengers comes from the third-class tickets, the most of which are sold to peasants. This tion last summer there was a vast emigration movement on foot toward the rich lands of the south-east. This was agitated in nearly all parts of Russia, poor and rich provinces alike, and was only prevented by quick action of the government, who feared an entire depopulation of some of the northern and central provinces. The inquisitiveness of the Yankee, and of the Scotchman, is proverbial, but it is nothing to that of the Russian. It pervades all classes, from the noble to the peasant. The stranger, whom you meet on the road, will always begin the acquaintance with, "Where from and where to?" and will then ask all the details of your life, your family, and your business. But he himself is by no means reticent: without the slightest provocation he will tell you what his sister died of, or why his brother's wife ran away, or about the curious adventure of his uncle, to say nothing of his own most intimate history. This makes traveling in Russia very amusing, and one can pick up a great quantity of valuable information on every topic without the trouble of asking. The Russian is essentially talkative, bavard, and speechmaking. The Russian peasant is by no means so stupid as he is often called. The children learn well and are bright and intelligent. One often meets with old men whose talk is entertaining and instructive. An intellectual business capacity often enables them to rise in the world. Bakúnin, one of the richest manufacturers at Moscow, began life as a weaver. Gubónin, a wealthy and successful railway contractor, was a serf. Even in the higher intellectual walks the Russian peasantry can show their fair share of self-made men. They produced Pososhkóf, the political economist of Peter the Great's reign, who anticipated the leading ideas of Adam Smith; Lomonósof, the savant and poet; Radistchef, an eminent writer of Catherine's time. Koltsóf and Nikitin, both remarkable poets, were peasants of Voronezh. Shevtchenko, distinguished both as a poet and painter, was a serf and even a lackey. The women, however, are densely stupid-a bad thing for the advocates of woman's equality, as they are here subject to the same conditions as the men. They share his labor, and have no discriminations made against them. With small rude means the peasant can effect great results. Give him his time and his own way, and he will work wonders. This was what astonished Harriet Martineau in Egypt, and what she called savage energy." Give a Russian peasant an axe, and he can build you a strong, warm, nicely-finished house, with a process astonishingly rude. The Russians make the largest and best-toned bells in the world. I saw one day a beautiful large bell, the sides covered with reliefs and inscriptions, which weighed enormously, and was with difficulty drawn on a sledge by forty horses, who had to stop every moment to rest and take a new start. When the bell arrived at the church, there was a simple apparatus of beams and ropes, which an old muzhik arranged; the leader began to sing a song, when they came to the chorus the crowd of men pulled, and in a moment the bell was safely landed and slid nicely into its place in the belfry. When the Luxor obelisk, which is 72 feet high and weighs about 120 tons, was brought to Paris, on a vessel especially prepared for it, the best French engineers devised a complicated arrangement to raise it on a pedestal 13 feet high, and thought it such a triumph of mechanics that they engraved the whole process on the pedestal. The column of Alexander at St. Petersburga granite monolith 84 feet high, 14 feet in diameter, and weighing 400 tons-was floated down from Finland on a raft, and was raised on a pedestal 25 feet high by the simplest means, under the direction of a common peasant. The handicraft of the peasants is astonishing. To say nothing of wood-carving, and fabrics in silk, wool, and cloth of gold, you can buy at Tula pistols equal in workmanship to fine English ones, and the gold and silver filagree work is equal to that of Genoa. The muzhik can in twelve hours learn to manage the most complicated machines of a cotton factory without further assistance. This quick ness of comprehension, combined with his restlessness causes him to change often his trade, a thing which injures the quality of Russian work. A paragraph has recently been going the rounds of the newspapers, which, like many others, has excited a good deal of amusement in Russia. It was to the effect that "such was the stupidity of the brutalized Russian soldiers," that they were incapable of learning the use of the new breech-loading arms, etc. The general capability of the peasant can hardly be injured by his becoming a soldier. Bad as it may be to take so many men from agricultural work, their new trade by no means "brutalizes" them. In every barracks there are schools, in which the recruit learns to read and write, and the improvement in appearance and intelligence is manifest to even the most careless observer, after the recruits have been six months in service. Discharged soldiers are in great demand for every kind of work. The magnificent shots which were made before the Emperor at Warsaw last fall, are a practical answer to the libel on the soldier's intelligence. The Russian is almost the only language in which there is no patois. In Little Russia and in White Russia there is a different dialect, the language of the people there having been influenced somewhat by the Polish. Even these can be understood with little trouble by any Russian. But throughout the rest of Russia the peasants speak with perfect grammatical correctness their complicated and racy language, with slight variations in idiom and pronunciation in different provinces. A foreigner could learn Russian in a peasant village, and yet talk the language of society. The genius of the language, and the shrewdness and worldly wisdom of the peasant, have given rise to a multitude of proverbs. Dahl has collected more than thirty thousand. But so pithy is the ordinary talk of a peasant, that thousands of other phrases are worthy of being classed as proverbs. Among these are great numbers of sayings about the weather, and the crops, such as are current among American and English farmers, and there is hardly a day in the year that has not a half-dozen sayings or prophecies. "If it snows on Epiphany, there will be a good harvest: if it is clear, a bad one." "As the weather at Candlemas, so the weather in spring." "On Elijah's day (July 20--August 1) there is thunder and rain." "If there is a good road on Christmas, there will be a good harvest of buckwheat." Many days are appointed by custom for certain things. The peasant never bathes in the rivers before the day of St. Agrafena the bather, (June 23-July 5) nor after Elijah's day. He commences the hay-harvest on St. John's day (June 24-July 6). On Elijah's day he begins to gather peas; on St. John the Faster, to gather turnips. There are also some of the same superstitious sayings that are found among Western nations: "On St. John's night the fern flowers;" "On St. Peter's day the sun dances," and many others. How far it is fair to call the peasant superstitious is hard to say. Some who know him well say that he is not nearly so superstitious as the ignorant class in Ireland or Germany, or as the lower class of proprietors in Russia. Among the 30,000 proverbs collected by Dahl there are not more than 600 which relate to superstitions, and the majority of these belong rather to what is called folk lore, signs of good or bad luck, or cures for slight ills. As examples of the latter are: "To rid your house of beetles, put as many as there are dwellers in your shoes, and grind them to powder on the road." "In autumn bury the worst fly in the ground, and the rest won't bite." The peasant is deeply and profoundly religious. He carries his religion into daily life more than the rest of us; he often crosses himself and repeats prayers. This is by some called superstition-not quite truly. However, many of the saints have merely taken the place of the old pagan gods, and there are some relics of old pagan rites. Such are the jumping over bonfires on St. John's eve, and the ceremony for defending a village against the cattle plague. This is very VOL. IX.-2 curious. At midnight a widow is harnessed naked to a plough, and with a procession of women armed with rakes, spades, etc., draws a furrow about the village. They carry a cock, a cat, and a dog, and among the songs-some of them obscene-which they sing, is this, "Pest, cattle-pest, do not hurt our cattle; we bury thee in the ground with cat, dog, and cock." No man must be present; any who meet them have to run for dear life. The peasants do not believe at all in ghosts, though they do in evil spirits, in charms, and in witches. Even lately witches have been brought before the courts; and they were sentenced to short imprisonments as for a breach of the peace. These witches are generally women who delight in displaying their possession by the evil spirit by screaming and fainting at the "Cheruvimi," a certain part of the Mass. A witch or sorcerer will not rest in the grave, the earth will not hold him, until a piece of aspen-wood is laid over him. Among evil spirits are the lyeshi, or spirit of the woods, who attracts and misleads; the rusalka, or water-sprite-both symbolizing the attractiveness of the woods and waters-and the domovoi or house-spirit, on whose head are laid all those misdeeds which we ascribe to the cat. It is to protect houses from the domovoi that holy pictures with a lamp before them are in every room. This is a custom to which foreigners always conform for the sake of the servants. The domovoi, like the German house-spirit, is not always evil. The only trace of a belief in ghosts is that the spirit of the dead is thought to remain about the house for forty days, till the forty day mass is said, and a small piece of bread is placed for it each night before the holy picture. Drivers and sailors are the most superstitious; among other things the former have a horror of cross-roads and graveyardsthe favorite haunts of evil spirits-and the latter are very much frightened if any one whistles on the water. Many of these beliefs are dying out, and one or two boys whom I questioned one day said: "Only old women believe in such things." Religious earnestness often goes so far with the Russian peasant as to lead him to dissent-though any deviation from the Church is strictly forbidden—and he then gives way to the wildest vagaries and fanaticism. The number of dissenters is comparatively small, about 2,000,000, but there are more than forty sects, some exceedingly curious, and every year or so a new one springs up. The peasant is born with a certain capacity of organization, and a tendency toward association, which render his future full of hope. The village is a communal society, and all the land is held in common and redistributed from time to time among the members, when need arises. It is governed by a stárosta, who is elected by the peasants, and is clothed by law with judicial powers. Whenever a peasant is an artisan he belongs to an artél, or co-operative association, which instructs him, finds him work, and provides him with lodging and a common table. The peasant is now free, but it is difficult to judge accurately about his condition. Doubtless he is on the whole better off since the emancipation, but there are many places where he is not so well off. In some of the northern and northwestern governments there have been bad harvests for several successive years. The communal stores of grain, which the masters were formerly obliged to keep full, were soon exhausted, and the peasants had not foresight enough to replenish them. During the last winter there was, therefore, much suffering from famine. The peasant has not yet become fully habituated to depend entirely on himself, and in some cases he regrets the loss of that second god-his master. But in the manufacturing, and in the richer agricultural provinces, his condition is certainly much improved. [May, He has to pay no rent to his master, and in the last autumn has been able to receive as high wages as three rubles a day. This was, however, owing to exceptional circumstances. He has received from eight to thirty-four acres of land, according to the province, either on a perpetual lease with the privilege of buying, or sold outright. This land is however held in common by the village, and there are no or very few instances of a peasant buying the land personally, though he has this privilege. As the emancipation weighed very heavily on the proprietors, a large share of the taxes was taken from them and laid on the peasants. The affairs of the proprietors are now in better trim, and these taxes are far too heavy for the peasants, and it is to be hoped that some change will soon be made. The peasants are as a mass still uneducated, though progress is being made in this direction. The schools in the cities are open to the peasants, and in many villages infant-schools have been started. There are villages in which, owing to the energy and good-will of the master, nearly all the children can read and write. But such cases are, unfortunately, too rare. By a recent decree of the Holy Synod, Sunday-schools are allowed and recommended. have been started in the Government of Lamara, and though the education there is too exclusively religious, they will, doubtless, be productive of much good. Schools for the instruction of the soldiers now exist in all the barracks and permanent stations. The peasants in the cities are either servants (izoostchiks) or artisans, and their education is generally much better than that of their country brethren. The rudiments of an education are by no means uncommon. among them. THE CLOISTERED ROOF. But cancels not the care: Our clinging earth-born heritage we carry everywhere. Many |