SUSPICIOUS PEASANTS. 159 



Russia. The most striking feature of the landscape 

 were big fields of sunflowers. 



All Russia nibbles sunflower seeds in its moments 

 of leisure. Imagine half the citizens of the United 

 States carrying, habitually, a supply of peanuts around 

 in their pockets and nibbling them continually, and 

 you have a hardly exaggerated idea of the ubiquitous 

 part played by the sunflower seed in Russian life. In 

 the circus, in the theater, in the offices, the shops, the 

 tea-houses, the city streets, the village door-stoop, 

 men, women, girls and boys, peasants, nobles, mer- 

 chants, soldiers — everybody, everywhere, nibble sun- 

 flower seeds. 



It is to supply this universal taste that thousands of 

 acres of those gorgeous flowers are cultivated on the 

 northern border of Malo Russia. 



People who have only seen the big sunflower as a 

 garden ornament can have but a dim conception of the 

 magnificent sight afforded by a forty-acre field of these 

 gorgeous yellow blossoms. I first saw a field of them 

 in the morning, when every big round golden face, with- 

 out an exception in all the myriads, was looking toward 

 the east. The scene was striking, and suggested a 

 vast multitude of floral Aztecs worshiping the morning 

 sun. Not being acquainted with the habits of the 

 sunflower I wondered all the morning whether all 

 those worshipful faces would, in the evening, be turned 

 toward the west. So I watched other fields as we rode 

 along, and learned, what every other reader of these 

 pages very likely knows already, that the sunflower 

 always turns its face to the east. 



Here the mind naturally reverted to a period of the 



