--there was a good deal of sickness in the
village,--she went to the hayfield to do the woman's work and prevent
the forfeit of fifteen or twenty cents, the price of the day's labor. We
strolled out to find her. The thermometer must have stood at 100 degrees
F., and although the dry inland heat can be better borne than the same
amount of damp heat, it was far from being comfortable weather even for
indolent persons. We found her under a tree, resting and drinking cold
tea, while she awaited the return, from some errand of their devising,
of the peasant women who had been at work with her. She looked
wretchedly ill, and we tried to prevail on her to go back to the house
with us. But the count (who was not well enough to work) happened along,
and as he said nothing she decided to stay and to resume labor at once,
since the women seemed to have been detained.

As we beat a retreat homeward under that burning sun, we discovered the
nature of the peasant women's urgent business. They were engaged in
stripping the count's bushes of their fruit and devouring it by the
handful. We could not persuade him to interfere. "They want it, or they
would not take it," he said. It was none of our business, to be sure,
but those strong, muscular women offered such a contrast, in physique
and conduct, to the fair, delicate young girl whom we had just left that
we felt indignant enough to attack them ourselves, if it would have done
any good. The next day his daughter was more seriously ill than the
peasant woman whose place she had taken. I should not have felt unhappy
to learn that those women had been uncomfortably ill in consequence of
their greediness.

The count has no longer a school for the peasant children, by the way.
The necessity for that is past. But he must have been an original
professor. A friend of mine in St. Petersburg, who was interested,
during the sixties, in the secular Sunday-schools for workingmen who
could not attend on week days, repeated to me the count's method as
imparted to her by himself while visiting the capital. He objected to
the rules which compelled the men to be regular in attendance, on the
ground that learning must not be acquired thus mechanically, under
compulsion, but when the scholar feels an inward impulse. He would not
listen to the suggestion that this method would hardly answer when study
must be prosecuted on specified days under penalty of eternal ignorance.
He said that when he found his