The various classes in the country are—the villagers, the Church, the Janded proprietors, and the " kulake." I mention the villagers first because they are by far the most interesting class. The socialistic system under ich they live, their habit of holding all land in common and re-dividing it every ten years or 60, their cheerful and very frequent festivals, avd their patriarchal customs make them one of the most picturesque and original peasant-societies in Europe.
The churches io the Russien country districts are as numerous and as imjing as the diarches in Ireland, bnt Russian clergy fall far below the Trish standard, being generally uncultivated people, differing from la-hourers only in the fact that they wear long hair and soutane. Just before I came to Krasny, the local had been unfrocked for stent drunkenness and wife-beating, but be was very popular aod on that account the people had tol erated bim about ten years longer than they shoald have done. At length, when he contracted a habit of getting drank on a Sunday morning, instead of saying Mass, a local landowner (who by the way, like almost all educated Russians, never goes to Mass himeelf) became scandalized and wrote' to the Holy Synod which at once removed the erring pastor. His successor was 8 sincere, gnarled, red-haired tuan whose pleased excitement on dis-photographing him and his wife. When I discovered that these photographs were all of them abject failures, I hurriedly left for St. Petersbarg as the simple-minded old man had been wound up to such a pitch of expectation that it would be difficult, nay, dangerous even, to break the news to him.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.