284 RUSSIA IN EUEOPE. 



Eussians may be regarded as the true aborigines of the land, a circumstance which 

 attaches all the more importance to their customs and traditions. 



The traces of Avater and tree worship are numerous. Certain springs still 

 receive the offerings of pilgrims, and feasts are held in honour of particular pine, 

 birch, and other trees. Stems blasted by lightning are preserved as precious 

 talismans, and never left behind when the peasant migrates to another home. The 

 memory of the dead also is still honoured w4th ancestral repasts, and the baked 

 meats are laid on the graves, or else in the ruins of churches. But while pagan 

 superstitions were preserved, little progress was made in agriculture. The grain, 

 thrown carelessly into the ground, scarcely ripens once in three times, and as he 

 sows the peasant resignedly repeats the proverb, " Await death, but sow thy corn, ' 

 or else tries to conjure the frost god (moroz) with offerings and the invitation, 

 " Come and eat, but spare our wheat." The method of threshing is probably 

 unique in Europe. A young girl holds the corn in one hand, and with the other 

 beats the ears over a hollow trunk, afterwards collecting the grain from the ground. 

 With such practices famine and misery may well be chronic in the land. The huts, 

 mostly grouped in small hamlets, are as destitute of furniture as the most wretched 

 hovels of the northern tundras, and the pig occupies the place of honour as in so 

 many Irish cabins. Merely for their bread the peasantry barter their children to 

 the szlachticz, or small landed proprietors. Worn out with thankless toil, or 

 wasted by the unhealthy climate, the White Russians are a sickly race, and pre- 

 maturely decrepit ; yet their type seems to be the most regular amongst all the 

 Russian Slavs. 



Seeino- their general poverty, we cannot be surprised at their avarice and want 

 of hospitality. But in the family circle they are very gentle, and paternal 

 despotism is of a milder type than in Great Russia. Their songs are full of tender 

 expressions, although those relating to marriage contain formulae showing that it 

 formerly consisted of an abduction or a bargain. In these songs the bride betrays 

 none of the terror shown by the Great Russian maiden "consigned by her 

 sovereign father and sovereign mother to a stranger of whom she had never 

 thouo-ht." And when the old forms are pronounced over the rod as it passes from 

 the father to the bridegroom, the nuptial chorus replies with an ironical strophe. 

 Free choice is evidently common enough, and the bride's dowry plays a small 

 part amongst this poverty-stricken people. " Take not her who is decked in gold," 

 says the chorus, " but her who is clothed in wisdom." 



The White Russian people have seen better days. They are not strangers to 

 thoughts of independence, and those whom they most admire are the free Little 

 Russian Cossacks, from whom they have borrowed over a third of their songs. But 

 durino- their long period of serfdom they acquired the vices inseparable from 

 slavery. The Polish feudal system weighed heavily on them, and the lands 

 suffered most from the devastating wars of the seventeenth century. Those were 

 the days of " Ruina," a Latin word which passed into their language, and is still 

 uttered with a shudder. But the wretched villages were soon rebuilt, the country 

 was opened up, the towns enriched by trade, while most of the old castles, convents. 



