guard against a possible stray wolf, we dashed past the
shadowy chalk hills; past the nodding sunflowers, whose sleepy eyes were
still turned to the east: past the grainfields, transmuted from gold to
silver by the moonlight; past the newly plowed land, which looked like
velvet billows in its depths of brown, as the moon sank lower and lower
beyond in a mantle of flame.

By this time practice had rendered us expert in retaining our seats in
the low, springless _lineika_; fortunately, for we were all three
quarters asleep at intervals, with excess of fresh air. Even when the
moon had gone down, and a space of darkness intervened before the day,
our headlong pace was not slackened for a moment. As we drove up to the
door, in the pearl-pink dawn, Tulip, the huge yellow mastiff with tawny
eyes, the guardian of the courtyard, received us with his usual
ceremony, through which pierced a petition for a caress. We heeded him
not. By six o'clock we were fast asleep. Not even a packet of letters
from home could keep our eyes open after that four-and-twenty hours'
picnic, which had been unmarred by a single fault, but which had
contained all the "experiences" and "local color" which we could have
desired.

How can I present a picture of all the variations in those sweet,
busy-idle days? They vanished all too swiftly. But now the rick-yard was
heaped high with golden sheaves; the carts came in steady lines,
creaking under endless loads, from those fields which, two years later,
lay scorched with drought, and over which famine brooded. The peasant
girls tossed the grain, with forked boughs, to the threshing-machine,
tended by other girls. The village boys had a fine frolic dragging the
straw away in bundles laid artfully on the ends of two long poles
fastened shaft-wise to the horse's flanks. We had seen the harvesting,
the plowing with the primitive wooden plow, the harrowing with equally
simple contrivances, and the new grain was beginning to clothe the soil
with a delicate veil of green. It was time for us to go. During our
whole visit, not a moment had hung heavy on our hands, here in the
depths of the country, where visitors were comparatively few and
neighbors distant, such had been the unwearied attention and kindness of
our hosts.

We set out for the river once more. This time we had a landau, and a
cart for our luggage. As we halted to drink milk in the Tchuvash
village, the inhabitants who chanced to be at home thronge