all gone—or," said he, whispering, "they think
so. Some of it is buried where they never shall
clutch it. Ah! the 'neimitz' came then. They
ruined the estate."

"Who is the 'neimitz'?"

"Who, indeed? There came here once, an
Englishman as superintendent of these works; I
liked him. When the men first went to pay
their respects to him, the poor starved-looking
beings told their tale in their faces, but poured
out also their grievances before him. He said that
he was only come to superintend the mechanical
processes, that with their social relations he
had nothing to do; but whatever was in his
power he would do, to make them comfortable.
In the mean time he gave them a day's holiday,
but our German steward forbade them to take
it; that, he said to the Englishman, is against
all rules. 'But come,' said the sneak, 'we can
make things comfortable by playing into one
another's hands. Come to my house to-night
and take a glass of schnaps, and we shall talk
the matter over; in the mean time I have
ordered the engines and works to go on
tomorrow as usual.' The Englishman turned him
out of the room, and then got the keys of the
factory and locked out the work-people, so that
they could not go to work. The frightened serfs
waited about the doors. The man who gave
the keys to the English superintendent, was
flogged by the steward. On the same day the
Englishman doubled his wages. But he could
not fight against a fellow who might send what
tales he pleased, to a master in the capital six
hundred miles away, so he gave up the contest,
and left us to our wretchedness."

It grieves me to tell what I learnt here, and
what I saw. The old general had left a son in
the army, who succeeded to the family
inheritance. The son, immediately on the old man's
death, married a very pretty German
adventuress whom he had met in one of the more
questionable saloons of Moscow. A daughter
was born to them, and soon afterwards the
husband was seized with a fit and died in a
ballroom, also at Moscow. The child being then
but three years old, the lady's brother was
appointed trustee and administrator of the estate
until she came of age—that is to say, was
seventeen years old, or married. This man's whole
effort was to enrich himself by exhausting the
wealth of the place during his trusteeship. A
German steward was put in, and every possible
thing was done to grind substance out of the
poor peasants. The widow, her brother, and
daughter lived at Moscow in a round of gaiety
and dissipation, never visiting the estates. The
steward was becoming very rich. Large sums
were being sent to Moscow out of mortgages
effected, and instead of the old happiness and
contentment amongst the serfs, there was an
utter bitterness of destitution. The works were
not kept in repair nor properly managed, and the
people, become lazy and sullen, were forced to
keep the mill going day and night in order to
keep up the original rate of production. At
four o'clock on Sunday afternoon the work
began, and never stopped till Sunday next at nine
A.M., when six hours were allowed for churchgoing.
A double set of hands working alternately,
kept the machinery in constant motion:
one set working for six hours while the other
set lay sleeping in corners. A bell was rung at
the end of each six hours, when the sleepers
rose up, and those who had been working lay
down. This went on night and day. Married
women brought their babies to the factory, where
I saw them stuck in cotton baskets, where
mothers bred, fed, slept, worked, and did all manner
of things in the grinding din of work—morality,
decency, or cleanliness, impossible and far-
off dreams. Indeed, these people had approached
more nearly to the condition of brutes than I
had thought possible for men and women; what
I saw here and heard elsewhere, did, let me
own it, turn my heart to a strong prejudice
against the Russian Germans. This widow of
the last male of the R.s was a German; her
brother the trustee was a German; his steward
was a German; and all of them were idle and
rapacious voluptuaries. The poor girl when she
comes of age will find the noble estate left by
her Russian grandfather and father ruined
irretrievably, and she will be one Russian more
hating the "neimitz." I have no doubt whatever
that, should a popular outbreak take place
and the pent-up fury of the peasantry find vent,
the first burst of retribution and vengeance
will fall on this part of the population.

Even the neimitz who was our travelling
companion did not allow us to reach our journey's
end until he had played a revengeful trick on one
of us, which made it necessary for us to decide
between turning him out of our kibitka, or
carrying him on, bound, as a prisoner to Moscow.
We turned him out, and, on the morning of the
eighth day of a perilous and fatiguing journey,
reached Moscow without him.

PURSUIT OF CRICKET UNDER
DIFFICULTIES.

I KNOW that we English are an angular and
eccentric people—a people that the great flat-
iron of civilisation will take a long time
smoothing all the puckers and wrinkles out of—
but I was scarcely prepared for the following
announcement that I saw the other day in a
tobacconist's window near the Elephant and
Castle:

On Saturday,
A Cricket Match will be played at the Rosemary
Branch, Peckham Rye,
between
Eleven One-armed Men and Eleven One-legged
Men.
The Match to begin at Eleven o'Clock A.M.

Well, I have heard of eccentric things in my
time, thought I, but I think this beats them all.
I know we are a robust muscular people, who
require vigorous exercise, so that we would
rather be lighting than doing nothing. Our
youth walk, run, shoot, fish, hunt (break their
necks, even, in pursuit of health), tramp the