tells me, I must go to Ekaterinoslaf, some
hundreds of versts off, or to the (said to be)
smiling villages in the governments of Koursk
and Woronesch. If I want to see peasants'
dwellings otherwise than in this interminable
grey garb, I must visit the Slobodas of
wealthy and puissant seigneurs—the Orloffs,
Demidoffs, and Tchérémetieffs, where the
houses are painted in all the colours of
the rainbow; where the Starosta's house
has a garden before and a garden behind,
and where there is positively a church whose
timbered sides are painted without, and
plastered within, and whose dome and
cupolas are daubed the brightest blue, and
bespangled with stars in burnished copper.
Not this for Volnoï. Here all is grey; yet
it is far from the sort of place where
Beranger's Merry little grey fat man would
elect to take up his abode. Road, and
palings, and scant herbage, and stones, and
houses are all of the exact tint of modeller's
clay. One longs not for the darling green of
English scenery, for that is hopeless and
unattainable, but for even the yellow smeared
houses of eastern towns, or the staring white
of French villages. There is but one variation
in hue,—far up above where the sun
dwells; and there it is indeed a hot and
copper sky, and the sun at noon is bloody.
But the great master of light and shade
disdains to throw Volnoï into chiaro oscuro.
He will parch, and wither, and blaze up its
surface with a uniformly-spread blast of
burning marl; but he will give it no dark
corners, no chequered lights—no Rembrandt
groves of rich brown—no Ostade diamond
touches of pearly brilliancy.

There is so deeprooted a want of confidence
in the quicksand-like soil of Russia on the
part of the dwellers in towns, as well as those
who abide in the country, that the foundations
of the houses reach far above the
earth. In St. Petersburg, indeed, the basement
of every house is vaulted, like the
bullion offices at the Bank of England. But
in villages such as this, precautions have been
taken to prevent the poor timber house
being blown away, or tumbling to pieces,
or falling head over heels, or sinking right
through the rotten earth, and coming out at
the antipodes. By a species of compromise
between the dog-kennel, the hen-roost, and
the pigeon-cote styles of architecture, the
houses are themselves perched upon blocks of
granite,—a material common enough in this
country, and admirably suited to the sculpture
of monoliths to great men, were there
any great men in it to raise monoliths to.
En attendant, they raise statues to the
rascals. There is naturally between the
planks of the ground-floor, and the ague-
steeped, malaria-emitting marshy ground
beneath, a space some fourteen inches in
height, and this space is a hothouse for foul
weeds, a glory-hole for nameless filth and
rubbish, and a perpetually fresh field and
pasture new for saurian reptiles and elephantine
vermin. The houses forming the oulitza,
or street, are not contiguous. They are
detached villa residences, with irregular
intervals, offering prospects of grey dust-
heaps and copper sky. But with not so
much as a clothes' pole which a Jonah
could sit under with the hope that he
might be overshadowed by a gourd in the
morning.

No shops. Shops are a feature of
village life not yet understood in a Russian
sloboda. Even in government towns of some
pretensions—even in the Gorods—where there
are two or three churches to every hundred
inhabitants—shops for the sale of the
commonest necessaries of life are woefully scanty
in number. There are some houses (in the
towns) where bread is sold; and in the
meanest villages there is the usual and
inevitable quota of government dram-shops; but
for every other article of merchandise,—
whether you desire to purchase it wholesale
or retail,—you must go, as in a Turkish town
in Asia Minor, or in a Hindostanee cantonment,
to the bazar, which is in a Gostinnoï-Dvor
on the smallest, seediest, rag-shoppish
scale, but called by the same high-sounding
name, and which is as much the centre of
sale and barter transactions, as though it
were either one of the stately edifices in
which the buyers and sellers of St. Petersburg
the heathen, and Moscow the holy,
spend or gain their millions of roubles.
There is no Gostinnoï-Dvor, of course, in such
petty villegiaturas as Volnoï, and the happy
villagers effect their little marketings in this
wise. The major proportion of the poor food
they eat, they produce themselves. The
coarse grain they and their cattle fodder on is
either garnered in their own bins behind
their own hovels, or is drawn, under
certain restrictions, and in stated rations—(in
times of scarcity)—from the common granary.
Though small their village home, the
Imperial government, in its wisdom and mercy,
and bent on comforting its people, has thrown
the ill boding shadow of its eagle wings over
a noisome shebeen of a vodki-larka, or grog-
shop, where, on high days and holidays, the
children of the Czar may drink themselves
as drunk as soot, without fear of punishment:
and where, on non-red letter days,
they get drunk with no permission at all—
and are duly sobered by the stick afterwards.
For raiment, the women weave some coarse
fabric for common wear, and spin some sail-
clothlike linen; as for calicoes and holiday
garments, the Starosta and the Bourmister
are good enough to make that little matter
right for the people between them. They
clothe the naked, for a consideration, and
in their beneficence take payment in the
smallest instalments for the goods supplied,
but woe to the moujik or the baba who is
behindhand in his or her little payments to
those inexorable tallymen.