far away. This is a merry time, I am sure
for some scores of gauzy bonnets with
pretty faces behind them; for hampers with
many bottles containing something else
besides salad mixture; for steamboat decks,
for pic-nic turfs, for Kenilworth and Netley
ruins, for the bow-window at the Trafalgar,
for eight hours at the seaside, for excursion
vans, for Sunday school festivals with their
many flags and monstrous tea-drinkings; for
the man with the trombone, and the gipsies
at Norwood and the Saint Sebastianised
artillery man at chalky Rosherville; for the
solemn chesnut-trees and timid deer of Bushey,
and the pert pagoda and shaven lawns of
Cremorne; for many thousand happy men
and women and children, who are disporting
themselves in God's good summer season.
I cannot linger further on the delights
which mirth can give; but I sum them
all up in a presumed Sherwood, and the
assumption that it is very merry there.
But, I am compelled to confess mournfully,
also, that the genuine merriment I
can recal is on the wrong side of fifteen
hundred miles away, and that it is the very
reverse of merry in the month of June in
the village of Volnoï Voloschtchok.

Merry! Imagine the merriment of a Cagot
village in Bearn in the middle of the Middle
Ages; imagine the joviality of the Diamond
in Derry, before Kirke's ships broke through
the Boom. Imagine the conviviality of a
select party of Jews beleaguered in the castle
of York, with the king's surgeon-dentists, to
the number of some thousands, outside.
Imagine the enjoyment of a Rabelais bound to
board and lodge with a John Calvin. I think
any of these reunions would surpass, in
outside gaiety at least, the cheerfulness of a
Russian Sloboda, and of the Russians at home
therein. As Alexis Hardshellovitch and I
emerge from the Starosta's house, and wander
up and down the longitudinal gap between
the houses, which may, by an extreme stretch
of courtesy, be called the main street. I may
here mention that the Street, regarded as a
thoroughfare, is as yet imperfectly understood
in Russia. The monstrous perspectives of
St. Petersburg have few imitations in the
provinces. There are even traces remaining
in modern Moscow of the circular streets
of the WEND villages; some of which yet
remain in the Altmark, and in the province of
Luneborg in Germany, and are common in
the purely Sclavonic parts of Russia. The
houses are jostled one against the other in a
circle, more or less regular, and there is but
one opening for ingress or egress. The cause
of this peculiar form of construction is doubtless
to be traced to the old Ishmaelitish times,
when every village's hand was against its
neighbour. In many of the Russian governments
there are still villages consisting of
a single street, closed at one extremity;
resembling what in western cities is termed a
blind alley. I feel a density of dullness and
mental melancholy settling on me in such a
place: the houses begin to look like cellular
vans; the few trees like gibbets; the birds
—the human ones I mean—like gaol-birds;
the whole place seems plague-stricken, or
panic-stricken, or famine-stricken, or all three
at once,

As for "Life," social acceptation of the
term, there is not a pinch of it in the whole
grey snuffbox of a hamlet. I am not
difficult to please as to villages. I don't
expect to find green lanes, trim hedges,
ivy-grown churches, smiling cottages, rosy
children, ponds with ducks, and cows, and
sheep, looking as though they had been
washed and spruced up for the especial benefit
of Mr. SIDNEY COOPER, R.A., who had sent
word he was coming. I don't expect to find
these things, as a matter of course, anywhere
but in an English village. I have seen some
of the dullest, dreariest, ugliest villages under
the sun in France and Germany and Belgium.
The clean village of Brock is not so clean as
it is, and much more hideous than it might
be; and I am given to understand that an
American "Shaker" village is calculated, for
gloominess in aspect and deficiency in the
picturesque, to "whop all creation" quite
hollow. Still, I am inclined to think that a
village peopled by primitive Puritans, who
had espoused the deceased wives' sisters'
husbands' wives of Mormon elders, and had
afterwards been converted to the Shaker way of
thinking, must be a community of roaring
prodigals compared to the inhabitants of
Volnoï.

Beyond the watch-tower, there is not one
building to give individuality to the village,
or any sign of communal organisation. The
Starosta's house is two or three sizes larger
than its fellows; the only other hut that may
be called a public building is the granary,
which is a barn of considerable size; but
houses and barns are all alike—all littered at
one farrow by one inexorable grey, dull,
dingy, timber-bristled sow. The very poorest
moujik's house is the diminished counterpart
of the reputedly wealthy Starosta's dwelling.
There is nowhere any sign of the humblest
decoration, the feeblest attempt at porch or
summer-house building, or parasitical shrub
training, or painting, or whitewashing, or even
paling-pitching. There is not a bench before
a door; but it must be admitted that over
each doorway there is a rough-fir board, on
which is branded rather than painted, in red
and white, the rudest resemblance of a
bucket, a hatchet, a saw, a ladder, a coil of
ropes, and similar implements. These Egypto-
Cherokee implements mean that the dwellers
in the doorways are respectively bucket-men,
hatchet-men, saw-men, and so forth; and
that, in case of fire, they are bound to provide
these implements, and to do suit and service
with them to their Barynn towards the
extinction of the conflagration. If I want to
see cottage porches and trailing plants, Alexis