f numerous
gardens. There is, however, not much to see within it, for even the
churches are mostly not older than the second half of the Eighteenth
Century.

The more southerly part of the province of Kursk is in the _Ukraine_,
or ancient border country. Its semi-nomadic population obtained in
early days the designation of Cossacks. This word is not Sclavonic,
but Turkish; and although it long denoted in Russia a free man, or,
rather, a man free to do anything he chose, it had been used by
the Tartar hordes to designate the lower class of their horsemen.
From the princes of the House of Rurik these southerly districts
passed into the possession of Lithuania, and, later, into those of
Poland. Little Russia was another arbitrary name anciently given
to a great part of what has been also known as the Ukraine. No fixed
geographical limits can be assigned to either of these designations,
and especially to the Ukraine of the Poles or the Muscovites; for
as the borders or marshes became safe and populated, they were
absorbed by the dominant power, and ultimately incorporated into
provinces. Little Russia is, in fact, a term now used only to denote
the Southern Russians as distinguished principally from the Great
Russians of the more central part of the empire.

There is a strongly-marked difference in the outward appearance,
the mode of life, and even the cast of thought of these two branches
of the Sclav race. The language of the Little Russian, or _Hohol_, as
he is contemptuously called by his more vigorous northern brother,
is a cross between the Polish and the Russian, although nearer akin
to the Muscovite than to the Polish tongue. Ethnographically, also,
the Little Russians become gradually fused with the White Russians of
the north-west (Mohilef and Vitebsk) and with the Slovaks of the
other side of the Carpathians. The _Malo-Ros_ (Little Russian)
is physically a better, though a less muscular man than the
_Veliko-Ros_, or Great Russian. He is taller, finer-featured, and
less rude and primitive in his domestic surroundings. The women
have both beauty and grace, and make the most of those qualities
by adorning themselves in neat and picturesque costumes, resembling
strongly those of the Roumanian and Transylvanian peasantry. Their
houses are not like those of other parts of Russia--log huts, full,
generally, of vermin and cockroaches; but wattled, thatched, and
whitewashed cottages, surrounded by gardens, and kept int