272 CENTRAL SIBERIA. 



pictures, photographs, &c., which make the lares and 

 penates of an English cottage. 



The villager himself is a sad-looking man, which is, 

 perhaps, not to be wondered at, for he only reflects the 

 circumstances of his existence. The excessive length 

 of his hair and the fulness of his bushy beard give 

 him a somewhat wild and uncouth appearance, and his 

 mirth is as brief as the short summer he enjoys, the 

 usual hard expression which he wears being but a 

 reflex of the long gloomy winter which broods over his 

 land. He wears a cotton blouse, generally of scarlet, 

 or one of the many shades which scarlet assumes 

 under the influence of sun and rain on its road to an 

 ultimate neutral tint, thick baggy trousers, whose 

 shape is the result of chance rather than design, and 

 the ends of which are tucked into big top-boots made 

 for comfort rather than for elegance. In addition to 

 a trouser end, a long-stemmed pipe is, as a rule, kept 

 in one, and a wad of tobacco, rolled up in an indescrib- 

 able rag, in the other, besides other small odds and 

 ends which might be found in an ordinary being's 

 pockets. He gets solemnly drunk on vodka when he 

 has nothing better to do, which is mostly, and is apt 

 to become aggressive under its influence. 



Vodka, indeed, is likely to prove the curse of Siberia. 

 I have related in a previous chapter how the post- 

 master one Sunday evening told me he would bring 

 the blacksmith to repair my tarantass if he was not 

 drunk, and on another occasion I found the postmaster 

 himself gloriously intoxicated at nine o'clock in the 

 miorning. Once in the small town of Zeminogorsk I 

 came to blows with an inebriated peasant, and narrowly 

 escaped being locked up by an oflicious police-ofiicer 

 for setting upon an inoflensive(?) subject of the Tsar ! 

 To prove that I was not the victim of chance, it is only 



