SCENES ON THE ROAD. 135 



attracts such numbers of them to this particular 

 locality. 



In the villages we now began to see small and tem- 

 porary rope-walks, and the cultivated landscape, which 

 farther north presented chiefly fields of rye and pota- 

 toes, here displayed broad areas of hemp, one of the 

 great staples of Russian export. The village rope- 

 walks were the property of itinerant rope-walkers, who 

 wander over the country from village to village to ply 

 their trade. They usually have a horse and telega to 

 convey their rope-making paraphernalia, and in all re- 

 spects live the life of gypsies and tinkers. They make 

 the hemp crops of the moujiks into rope of various 

 sizes for a small amount per pood, and, when they have 

 exhausted the stock of customers in one village, pull 

 up stakes and move on to the next. 



It was in the village of Subazhna where a youthful 

 assistant to one of these rope-makers gave me a new 

 idea of the extent to which the curse of vodka-drink- 

 ing has undermined the moral perceptions of the rural 

 Russians. It was a wet, miserable day, and we were 

 compelled to remain over at the village traktir. It 

 was some sort of a holiday, and the traktir was full 

 of roystering moujiks, spending the day, as moujiks 

 spend all their holidays, — drinking themselves into a 

 beastly state of intoxication. 



I had taken a little table out under the shed and 

 was writing a letter, when there came reeling out of 

 the back door the youth in question, well-nigh help- 

 lessly drunk. He was not more than twelve years old, 

 and was endeavoring, in a pitifully maudlin way, to 

 make a display of jollification. Over and over again 



