FORESTS OF ARCHAKGEL. 5$ 



It is the joke of a Russian jarvey, that he will " drive you 

 out of your senses for ten kopecs." From dawn to sunset, 

 day by day, it is one long race through bogs and pines. 

 The landscape shows no dykes, no hedges, and no gates ; 

 no signs that tell of a person owning the land. We 

 whisk by a log fire and a group of tramps, who flash upon 

 us with a sullen greeting, some of them starting to their 

 feet. " What are those fellows, Dimitri?" "They seem 

 to be some of the Runaways." " Runaways ! Who are the 

 Runaways ? What are they running away from ?" lt Queer 

 fellows, who don't like work, who won't obey orders, who 

 never rest in one place. You find them about here in the 

 woods everywhere. They are savages. In Kargopol you 

 can learn about them." 



' At the town of Kargopol, on the river Onega, in the 

 province of Olonetz, I hear something of these Runaways, 

 as of a troublesome and dangerous set of men, bad in 

 themselves, and still worse as a sign. I hear of them 

 afterwards in Novogorod the Great, and in Kazan. The 

 community is widely spread. Tinvashef is aware that 

 these unsocial bodies exist in the provinces of Yaroslav, 

 Archangel, Vologda, Novogorod, Kostroma, and Peren.' 



At Kargopol he got the information for which he asked, 

 but this concerns us not here. At present we have to do 

 with his journey and with what he saw. 



' Village after village passes to the rear. Russ hamlets 

 are so closely modelled on a common type that when you 

 have seen one, you have seen a host ; when you have seen 

 two you have seen the whole. Your sample may be either 

 large or small, either log-built or mud-built, either hidden 

 in forest or exposed on steppe ; yet in the thousands on 

 thousands to come you will observe no change in the pre- 

 vailing form. There is a Great Russ hamlet, and a Little 

 Russ hamlet ; one with its centre in Moscow, as the capi- 

 tal of Velika Rouss [Great Russia], the second with its 

 centre in Kief, the capital of Malo Rouss [Little Russia.] 



' A Great Russ village consists of two lines of cabins 

 parted from each other by a wide and dirty lane. Each 



