"You have done so. I am an infant, and
Nature is my mother. Oh, to be restored to the
full joy of life, the scent of wild flowers, the song
of birds, and this air—summer air—summer air!"

I know not why it was, but at that moment,
looking at him and hearing him, I rejoiced that
Lilian was not at L——.

"But I came out to bathe. Can we not bathe
in that stream?"

"No. You would derange the bandage round
your hand; and for all bodily ills, from the least
to the gravest, there is nothing like leaving
Nature at rest the moment we have hit on the
means which assist her own efforts at cure."

"I obey, then, but I so love the water."

"You swim, of course?"

"Ask the fish if it swim. Ask the fish if it
can escape me! I delight to dive down—down;
to plunge after the startled trout, as an otter
does; and then to get amongst those cool, fragrant
reeds and bullrushes, or that forest of emerald
weed which one sometimes finds waving under
clear rivers. Man! man! Could you live but an
hour of my life you would know how horrible a
thing it is to die!"

"Yet the dying do not think so; they pass
away calm and smiling, as you will one day."

"I—I! die one day—die!" and he sank on
the grass, and buried his face amongst the herbage,
sobbing aloud.

Before I could get through half a dozen words,
meant to soothe, he had once more bounded up,
dashed the tears from his eyes, and was again
singing some wild, barbaric chant. I did not
disturb him; in fact, I soon grew absorbed in my
own meditations on the singular nature, so
wayward, so impulsive, which had forced intimacy
on a man grave and practical as myself.

I was puzzled how to reconcile so passionate a
childishness, so undisciplined a want of self-
control, with an experience of mankind so
extended by travel, with an education, desultory
and irregular indeed, but which must have been
at some time or other familiarised to severe reasonings
and laborious studies. There seemed to be
wanting in him that mysterious something which
is needed to keep our faculties, however severally
brilliant, harmoniously linked together—as the
string by which a child mechanically binds the
wild flowers it gathers; shaping them at choice
into the garland or the chain.

AT HOME IN RUSSIA.

IN A PEASANT'S HUT.

TEN at night found us within a station of
Pereslaf. After getting our conveyance under
cover, and our light luggage removed to the
house or den, I had time to visit an adjoining
peasant's hut.

Here was a whole family spinning and weaving
flax. The family manufactory included every
process, from the scutching to the linen weaving,
all carried on within the space of a room twenty
feet square. ln a corner stood a mild, elderly
father scutching the straw from the flax; the
mother sat near him, helped by a son, combing
out the tow with hand brushes; every now
and then throwing small twisted rolls of the tow
into a bunker, and plaiting up the long flax ready
for sale or spinning. Three rather good-looking
girls were spinning and twirling the thread,
several young ones were winding and unwinding
the yarn, and one girl was the weaver at her
loom plying the busy shuttle. The whole
machinery employed in this primitive workshop
and family manufactory—hear it, ye Baxters of
Dundee, and Marshalls of Leeds—loom included,
would not cost two sovereigns. My companion
and fellow-traveller, a young Russian, very soon
was on good terms with the young folks, and as
I sat down by the dame, the old man joined us,
and we talked of the late storm and its
consequences, of the flax work, and of how they sold
what they made, to pay the baron. They were
communicative on the prices they got for the
different qualities, told me how they worked at
this all winter, and on the land all summer;
how the baron was a good man, but spent in
Moscow and Petersburg his time and money,
leaving his poor slaves to the tender mercies of
a German steward, who skinned them unmercifully.
One of their boys, they said, had gone,
or rather had been sent, to the Crimea as a
soldier, and they had never heard of him since;
another son was at Moscow in a woollen fabric,
and had to pay fifty roubles a year, "obrok," to
the baron. The two eldest girls had been ordered
to marry after Easter, and to marry men they
did not like. One of the men was a drunken
worthless fellow, but ah, dear Heaven, had not
their father, the emperor, God bless him!
decreed their emancipation! And were they not
soon to do what they liked, and be freed from
the "obrok"! Their notions of liberty or
political rights amounted to this, and no more.

Having sent my companion for tea and sugar,
I asked the girls to prepare the urn, and further
ingratiated myself by buying a piece of the linen
they had made and bleached on the grass the
previous summer. While the tea was being
handed about an old woman came in: the
"swacha," or ambassadress, from one of the
intended bridegrooms. All marriages among the
common people in Russia are negotiated by
such go-betweens, who arrange preliminaries,
extol the qualities of their clients, examine and
decide on the trousseau of the bride, and act as
head negotiators in the whole affair. When the
father of the bride can afford it, money is
demanded, and a written list of the "predania," or
articles of the trousseau, is given in. The
articles accordingly supplied are scrutinised, and
accepted, rejected, or exchanged, according to the
fiat of the old go-between. There is no courtship
or personal affection before these marriages. The
woman generally submits, as a matter of course,
and becomes the slave of any brute appointed
by the baron or steward, or by her father when
no master interferes.

I know a family of free Russians, in which
the father was of the rank of "chinovnick."