le" 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_ w