ping to get things ready. When I was leaving I said
to her, "I've been wondering when you get your rest?"

She smiled brightly, and said cheerfully, "In the winter, sir."

That's when the Russian peasant gets his rest also, and with the spring
he begins his energetic life of farming and agriculture, of carting and
labour. The long days are busy and all too short, the brief nights are
hardly more than an interval. The whole land is full of movement, the
air is full of song and music, the holidays marked by game and dance.
Nothing could be more unlike the bitter cold and gloom of Russia's long
and terrible winter than the glow, brilliance, joy, and never-ceasing
activities of her amazingly rich and life-giving summer. Her peasantry
must present the same contrasts in homes and seeming temperaments, and
two writers may therefore be widely asunder in their descriptions, and
yet both write truthfully of the things they have seen and known at
different times of the year.

To me the Russian peasant is, as to others who have known him at his
best, an amiable, attractive, intelligent, thoroughly good-natured and
altogether lovable creature. It is quite true that he can do, has done,
and may again do some perfectly appalling things, but it has been when
thoroughly worked up, as one of a crowd, and when every one else has
lost his head. Terrible things which were not allowed to be known in
Europe outside their frontiers, and now will probably never be known,
were done during the revolution of seven years ago. But the Russian
peasants are like children, as yet, and any one who knows and loves
children knows perfectly well also what they are capable of, if they
have any spirit in them, when thoroughly worked up, and when they too
have for the time being lost their head and feel capable of almost
anything that will hurt and pain and annoy. The peasants are in this, as
in many other things, like children.

As soon as the statistics of the Russian peasantry come to be examined a
startling fact comes to light. More than half their number--582 out of
every 1,000--die before they are five years old. This means, as in the
more inclement parts of our own country, that those who survive are a
hardy race, strong and virile. The mortality is greatest amongst male
children--over 600 out of every 1,000--and those, therefore, who do live
are strong enough for anything and of amazing vitality, as we have seen
in the present war.

Not only are