CHAP. iv. THE PEASANTRY. 35 



English names of various articles. They were extremely 

 good-natured, enjoyed a broad joke, laughed heartily at our 

 pigeon-Kuss, and were, so far as we could judge, perfectly 

 honest. We left our sledges with all our luggage, wraps, 

 &c., unprotected, sometimes for an hour, at the station where 

 we stopped for a meal, and on no occasion had anything been 

 stolen. In the villages on this part of the journey we noticed 

 a number of crosses, generally one or two at the entrance, 

 and one near the centre of the village. They were made of 

 wood, and were about ten feet high, the oidinary Greek 

 double cross, with an oblique foot-bar, and most of them were 

 protected by a wooden roof to keep off the snow. Both the 

 roof and the cross itself were, as a rule, elaborately carved, 

 and the whole face of the cross was covered with inscriptions 

 (no doubt Slavonic) in about three-inch letters. Sometimes 

 in the poorer villages the crosses were not carved, and the 

 inscription and ornamentation were simply painted upon the 

 wood, generally in various colours. The Eussian peasantry 

 in Siberia in Europe seem to be fond of ornamentation. 

 The majority of the houses are built with the gable end 

 to the street, and in the centre of the gable is a window, 

 opening on to a balcony. This balcony, the framework of 

 the windows, the ends of the rain-gutters, and the ends of the 

 ridge of the roof, were often elaborately carved and fretted, 

 and sometimes painted in gay colours. In nearly all the 

 villages we noticed a conspicuous arrangement of railings for 

 the drying of flax, hay, or corn. In the station-houses we 

 found the men, and sometimes the women, engaged in spin- 

 ning flax, making nets, or weaving coarse linen. In the 



