150 THROUGH RUSSIA ON A MUSTANG. 



moujik of Malo Russia a flower. His raiment consists 

 of a coarse white shirt and loose black trousers, top 

 boots, and almost any kind of a hat that comes his way. 



" Poppies " were yet reasonably numerous, however ; 

 and at noon on July 1 1, we halted for refreshments at 

 a wayside traktir, kept by a very energetic old lady, 

 who immediately took us into her confidence in regard 

 to the laziness and all-round worthlessness, of a young- 

 gentleman in a red shirt to whom she bore the relation- 

 ship of mother-in-law. The old lady was one of the 

 singularly few persons I came across in Russia who 

 seemed to have positive, rather than negative, qualities 

 of mind and body ; and almost without asking us what 

 we wished to eat, she set about making us a big 

 omelette, and boiling potatoes. Her son-in-law, she 

 avowed, was the disappointment of her life. She was 

 a farmer as well as proprietor of the traktir, and her 

 ambition had been to secure a husband for her daugh- 

 ter who would make a success of the farm whilst she 

 attended to the traktir. As it turned out, she and her 

 daughter had to perform most of the work, whilst the 

 son-in-law did little beyond eating what they earned, 

 drinking vodka, and sleeping on top of the stove. 



When we rode up, both daughter and son-in-law 

 were out in the harvest field; but the old lady assured 

 us that it was the daughter alone who was doing any 

 work. The son-in-law, she said, would be found 

 snoozing beneath a shock of grain, pretending to be 

 ill. 



A couple of hours after our arrival, the object of the 

 old lady's wrathful denunciations turned up to sharpen 

 his scythe and eat his dinner. He turned out to be a 



