COLONISTS AND EXILES IN SIBERIA. 519 



intelligent, hospitable, good-natured and warm-hearted, and it is not 

 too much to say that his prosperity has given him considerable self- 

 esteem and a certain appreciation of freedom. His bearing is freer 

 and less depressed than that of the Russian peasants. He is polite 

 and obliging, submissive, and therefore easily managed; but he is 

 not servile, cringing or abject, and the impression he makes on a 

 stranger is by no means unfavourable. But he possesses all the 

 qualities which we call loutishness in a high degree, and several 

 others as well, which are calculated to weaken the first impression. 

 Although he has had more educational advantages than any others 

 of his class in Siberia, he is anything but in love with school. He is 

 strictly religious and ready to give up what he possesses to the 

 Church, but he looks upon school as an institution which spoils men 

 rather than educates them. With a lasting recollection of a former 

 state of things, when the old discharged soldiers, who held the edu- 

 cational sceptre in the times of his fathers, did not scruple to send 

 the scholars for " schnaps ", and even to maltreat them while under its 

 influence, he is exceedingly suspicious of everything connected with 

 " education ". He also clings, peasant-like, to whatever has been in 

 the past, and imagines that more knowledge than he himself possesses 

 will be injurious to his children, and it is by no means easy to con- 

 vert him from this opinion. The state of education is thus very 

 low. It is only exceptionally that he has acquired the art of writing, 

 and he invariably regards books as entirely superfluous articles. 

 But he clings, on that account, so much the more firmly to the 

 superstition which his Church countenances and promulgates. He 

 rarely knows the names of the months, but can always tell off the 

 names of the saints and their festivals on his fingers: God and the 

 saints, archangel and devil, death, heaven, and hell occupy his 

 mind more than all else. He cannot be described as easily satisfied, 

 yet he is perfectly contented. He does not wish for more than the 

 necessaries of life, and therefore only works as much as he absolutely 

 must. But neither his farm premises nor the fields which he calls 

 his can be too large, neither his family nor his flock too numerous. 



" How is it with you here?" I asked, through an interpreter, one 

 of the heads of a village whom we picked up on the way. 



