whole day, agreeably conscious that they are pleasing
themselves and the Church at one and the same time--a state of
perfection as rare as it is desirable. Reason unaided by Faith is of
course exasperated at this waste of precious time, and I confess that
during the first mild days after the long winter frost when it is
possible to begin to work the ground, I have sympathised with the gloom
of the Man of Wrath, confronted in one week by two or three empty days
on which no man will labour, and have listened in silence to his remarks
about distant Russian saints.

I suppose it was my own superfluous amount of civilisation that made
me pity these people when first I came to live among them. They herd
together like animals and do the work of animals; but in spite of the
armed overseer, the dirt and the rags, the meals of potatoes washed down
by weak vinegar and water, I am beginning to believe that they would
strongly object to soap, I am sure they would not wear new clothes, and
I hear them coming home from their work at dusk singing. They are like
little children or animals in their utter inability to grasp the idea
of a future; and after all, if you work all day in God's sunshine, when
evening comes you are pleasantly tired and ready for rest and not much
inclined to find fault with your lot. I have not yet persuaded myself,
however, that the women are happy. They have to work as hard as the men
and get less for it; they have to produce offspring, quite regardless
of times and seasons and the general fitness of things; they have to do
this as expeditiously as possible, so that they may not unduly interrupt
the work in hand; nobody helps them, notices them, or cares about them,
least of all the husband. It is quite a usual thing to see them working
in the fields in the morning, and working again in the afternoon, having
in the interval produced a baby. The baby is left to an old woman whose
duty it is to look after babies collectively. When I expressed my horror
at the poor creatures working immediately afterwards as though nothing
had happened, the Man of Wrath informed me that they did not suffer
because they had never worn corsets, nor had their mothers and
grandmothers. We were riding together at the time, and had just passed
a batch of workers, and my husband was speaking to the overseer, when
a woman arrived alone, and taking up a spade, began to dig. She grinned
cheerfully at us as she made a curtesy, and the overse