1 4 THR UGH R US SI A ON A MUS TA NG. 



about their occupant's heads, and in no country of the 

 world (and I had been in twenty-four), had I seen peo- 

 ple so wretchedly lodged as part of the population of 

 Tchudovo. Many, however, were good, comfortable 

 board or log houses, comparable to the houses of 

 eighty-acre farmers in the West. Half the houses 

 might, perhaps, come under this description ; one 

 fourth of them would be considered by us as wholly 

 unfit for human habitation, and the remainder were 

 superior dwellings, from the American farmer's stand- 

 point, including one which might fairly be termed a 

 mansion. 



There was a bakery, in front of which, on a rude 

 bench, a row of huge rye loaves were exposed for sale. 

 There were three or four general stores, the counter- 

 parts of the American corner grocery, and as many 

 vodka and mead and kwass shops. There was the inev- 

 itable village smithy and a school ; towering over all 

 was a large white church, surmounted by four blue 

 domes and a blue spire. Both church and mansion 

 were of Graeco-Corinthian architecture, a fact that led 

 one to suspect that the founder of the church and the 

 former occupant of the mansion, before the emancipa- 

 tion of the serfs in 1861, was the nobleman who owned 

 the land and peasantry of the district. 



We made our way to the blacksmith shop, here, as in 

 the West, often the gossiping place of the village, and 

 entered into conversation with the blacksmith, a man 

 of fifty, his son and assistant, a young man of twenty- 

 five, and a ragged moujik, all of whom took off their hats 

 as we entered and sat down. As many of my readers 

 already know, the Russian villages are communes of 



