2 1 8 THRO UGH R US SI A ON A MUS TA NG. 



when in their cups. Few Americans but would much 

 rather be kicked than kissed by a man ; and the better 

 educated Russians are nowadays getting to be more 

 reserved in the matter of public osculatory greetings 

 between man and man. 



We put up at a post-station, the first night out from 

 Ekaterinoslav, twenty-five versts from the scene of our 

 late detention and worrying by the police. A young 

 Pole, in the uniform of an infantry regiment, here 

 weighed the hay and measured the oats for our horses. 

 His regiment was stationed at Ekaterinoslav, and, like 

 most of the soldiers who comprised its rank and file, was 

 endeavoring to augment his fat pay of two rubles and 

 seventy-five kopecks (one and a half dollars) a year, by 

 working in the harvest fields. He was permitted to 

 work out, he said, twenty-five days a month. During 

 harvest he could earn three rubles a fortnight, for which 

 he had to work about sixteen hours a day ; at other 

 times from three to four rubles a month when he could 

 get anything to do. This youth, buried in a Russian 

 regiment, a thousand miles from home, was still 

 at heart every inch a Pole, as every Pole continues to 

 be wherever you happen across one. " I'm not a Rus- 

 sian," he said, the first chance he had of speaking 

 about himself, " I'm a Pole." 



From this station we made a detour of about twenty 

 versts off the main road to visit the historic grounds 

 of the Zaparozhian Cossacks, on the Dneiper. Our 

 way was over the rolling steppe, which was here 

 and there distinguished by a mound about twenty 

 feet high and fifty in diameter, surmounted by a 

 wooden cross. These were the graves of the old 



