32 THROUGH RUSSIA ON A MUSTANG. 



Tchudovo. You may admire the German colonist and 

 call him wise, but the moujik would win your heart 

 for his good nature and generous impulses. If you 

 were to fall into the river the German would think 

 twice before jumping in after you ; but the Russian 

 wouldn't even stop to consider whether he knew how 

 to swim before plunging in." 



I felt very much like summing up all that the pristav 

 had said about the moujik, except his generosity, in the 

 one cynical comment "laziness," yet that same morn- 

 ing I had seen laborers at work at 2.30, and had been 

 assured that in the summer season, the "white nights," 

 when you can see to read a newspaper in the streets of 

 St. Petersburg at midnight, the moujik is astir twenty 

 hours out of the twenty-four. 



On the subject of official Russia the pristav was on 

 his own ground, and spoke at length. He referred to 

 himself as an unit of the system. In him and his posi- 

 tion, he said, we had before us a fair sample of the en- 

 tire official system of Russia. He was Chief of Police 

 over a district as large as two American counties, and 

 was held responsible for the acts of 50,000 people. 

 Half the time he was on horseback or in- a troika, and 

 he had been without sleep for three nights at a stretch. 

 He had more than a thousand documents pigeon-holed 

 in his office that needed his attention, yet the author- 

 ities at St. Petersburg thought nothing of taking up 

 his time in the most trivial things. With hundreds of 

 important grievances, criminal cases, and what not on 

 hand, one half of which he would not be able to at- 

 tend to if he never slept nor rested, he had just re- 

 ceived orders from St. Petersburg to personally super- 



