l-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