Russian Rambles

II.

Our life at Prince X.'s estate on the Volga flowed on in a semi-monotonous, wholly delightful state of lotus- eating idleness, though it assuredly was not a case which came under the witty description once launched by Turgeneff broadside at his countrymen: 'The Russian country proprietor comes to revel and simmer in his ennui like a mushroom frying in sour cream.' Ennui shunned that happy valley. We passed the hot mornings at work on the veranda or in the well-filled library, varying them by drives to neighboring estates and villages, or by trips to the fields to watch the progress of the harvest, now in full swing. Such a visit we paid when all the able-bodied men and women in the village were ranged across the landscape in interminable lines, armed with their reaping-hooks, and forming a brilliant picture in contrast with the yellow grain, in their blue and scarlet raiment. They were fulfilling the contract which bound them to three days' labor for their landlord, in return for the pasturage furnished by him for their cattle. A gay kerchief and a single clinging garment, generally made of red and blue in equal portions, constituted the costume of the women. The scanty garments were faded and worn, for harvesting is terribly hard work, and they cannot use their good clothes, as at the haying, which is mere sport in comparison. Most of the men had their heads protected only by their long hair, whose sunburnt outer layer fell over their faces, as they stooped and reaped the grain artistically close to the ground. Their shirts were of faded red cotton; their full trousers, of blue-and-red-striped home-made linen, were confined by a strip of coarse crash swathed around the feet and legs to the knee, and cross-gartered with ropes. The feet of men and women alike were shod with low shoes of plaited linden bark over these cloths.

They smiled indulgently at our attempts to reap and make girdles for the sheaves,-the sickles seemed to grow dull and back-handed at our touch,-chatting with the dignified ease which characterizes the Russian peasant. The small children had been left behind in the village, in charge of the grandams and the women unfit for field labor. Baby had been brought to the scene of action, and installed in luxury. The cradle, a cloth distended by poles, like that of Peter the Great, which is preserved in the museum of the Kremlin at Moscow, was suspended from the upturned shafts of a telyega by a stiff spiral spring of iron, similar to the springs used on bird-cages. The curtain was made of the mother's spare gown, her sarafan. Baby's milk- bottle consisted of a cow's horn, over the tip of which a cow's teat was fastened. I had already seen these dried teats for sale in pairs, in the popular markets, but had declined to place implicit faith in the venders' solemn statements as to their use.

It was the season which the peasants call by the expressive title strada (suffering). Nearly all the summer work must be done together, and, with their primitive appliances, suffering is the inevitable result. They set out for the fields before sunrise, and return at indefinite hours, but never early. Sometimes they pass the night in the fields, under the shelter of a cart or of the grain sheaves. Men and women work equally and unweariedly; and the women receive less pay than the men for the same work, in the bad old fashion which is, unhappily, not yet unknown in other lands and ranks of life. Eating and sleeping join the number of the lost arts. The poor, brave people have but little to eat in any case,-not enough to induce thought or anxiety to return home. Last year's store has, in all probability, been nearly exhausted. They must wait until the grain which they are reaping has been threshed and ground before they can have their fill.

One holiday they observe, partly perforce, partly from choice, though it is not one of the great festivals of the church calendar,-St. Ilya's Day. St. Ilya is the Christian representative of the old Slavic god of Thunder, Perun, as well as of the prophet Elijah. On or near his name day, July 20 (Old Style), he never fails to dash wildly athwart the sky in his chariot of fire; in other words, there is a terrific thunderstorm. Such is the belief; such, in my experience, is the fact, also.

Sundays were kept so far as the field work permitted, and the church was thronged. Even our choir of ill-trained village youths and boys could not spoil the ever-exquisite music. There were usually two or three women who expected to become mothers before the week was out, and who came forward to take the communion for the last time, after the newborn babes and tiny children had been taken up by their mothers to receive it.

Every one was quiet, clean, reverent. The cloth-mill girls had discovered our (happily) obsolete magenta, and made themselves hideous in flounced petticoats and sacks of that dreadful hue. The sister of our Lukerya, the maid who had been assigned to us, thus attired, felt distinctly superior. Lukerya would have had the bad taste to follow her example, had she been permitted, so fast are evil fashions destroying the beautiful and practical national costumes. Little did Lukerya dream that she, in her peasant garb, with her thick nose and rather unformed face, was a hundred times prettier than Annushka, with far finer features and 'fashionable' dress.

Independent and 'fashionable' as many of these villagers were, they were ready enough to appeal to their former owners in case of illness or need; and they were always welcomed. Like most Russian women who spend any time on their estates, our hostess knew a good deal about medicine, which was necessitated by the circumstance that the district doctor lived eight miles away, and had such a wide circuit assigned to him that he could not be called in except for serious cases. Many of the remedies available or approved by the peasants were primitive, not to say heroic. For example, one man, who had exhausted all other remedies for rheumatism, was advised to go to the forest, thrust the ailing foot and leg into one of the huge ant-hills which abounded there, and allow the ants to sting him as long as he could bear the pain, for the sake of the formic acid which would thus be injected into the suffering limb. I confess that I should have liked to be present at this bit of-surgery, shall I call it? It would have been an opportunity for observing the Russian peasant's stoicism and love of suffering as a thing good in itself.

The peasants came on other errands, also. One morning we were startled, at our morning coffee, by the violent irruption into the dining-room, on his knees, of a man with clasped hands uplifted, rolling eyes, and hair wildly tossing, as he knocked his head on the floor, kissed our hostess's gown, and uttered heart-rending appeals to her, to Heaven, and to all the saints. 'Barynya! dear mistress!' he wailed. 'Forgive! Yay Bogu, it was not my fault. The Virgin herself knows that the carpenter forced me to it. I'll never do it again, never. God is my witness! Barynya! Ba-a-rynya! Ba-a-a-a-a-a-rynya! ' in an indescribable, subdued howl. He was one of her former serfs, the keeper of the dramshop; and the carpenter, that indispensable functionary on an isolated estate, had 'drunk up' all his tools (which did not belong to him, but to our hostess) at this man's establishment. The sly publican did not offer to return them, and he would not have so much as condescended to promises for the misty future, had he not been aware that the law permits the closing of pothouses on the complaint of proprietors in just such predicaments as this, as well as on the vote of the peasant Commune. Having won temporary respite by his well-acted anguish, he was ready to proceed again on the national plan of avos which may be vulgarly rendered into English by 'running for luck.'

But even more attractive than these house diversions and the village were the other external features of that sweet country life. The mushroom season was beginning. Equipped with baskets of ambitious size, we roamed the forests, which are carpeted in spring with lilies of the valley, and all summer long, even under the densest shadow, with rich grass. We learned the home and habits of the shrimp-pink mushroom, which is generally eaten salted; of the fat white and birch mushrooms, with their chocolate caps, to be eaten fresh; of the brown and green butter mushroom, most delicious of all to our taste, and beloved of the black beetle, whom we surprised at his feast. However, the mushrooms were only an excuse for dreaming away the afternoons amid the sweet glints of the fragrant snowy birch-trees and the green-gold flickerings of the pines, in the 'black forest,' which is a forest composed of evergreens and deciduous trees. Now and then, in our rambles, we met and skirted great pits dug in the grassy roads to prevent the peasants from conveniently perpetrating thefts of wood. Once we came upon a party of timber-thieves (it was Sunday afternoon), who espied us in time to rattle off in their rude telyega with their prize, a great tree, at a rate which would have reduced ordinary flesh and bones to a jelly; leaving us to stare helplessly at the freshly hewn stump. Tawny hares tripped across our path, or gazed at us from the green twilight of the bushes, as we lay on the turf and discussed all things in the modern heaven and earth, from theosophy and Keely's motor to-the other extreme.

When the peasants had not forestalled us, we returned home with masses of mushrooms, flower-like in hue,- bronze, pink, snow-white, green, and yellow; and Osip cooked them delicately, in sour cream, to accompany the juicy young blackcock and other game of our host's shooting. Osip was a cordon bleu, and taxed his ingenuity to initiate us into all the mysteries of Russian cooking, which, under his tuition, we found delicious. The only national dish which we never really learned to like was one in which he had no hand,-fresh cucumbers sliced lengthwise and spread thick with new honey, which is supposed to be eaten after the honey has