ernally
in order and cleanliness.

Their lives are altogether more happy, although their songs, full
of deep feeling, and not without a vein of romance are, like those
of all Sclavs, plaintive and in the minor key. The men sing of
the daring exploits of their Cossack forefathers, who were not
free-booters like the old Cossacks of the Volga, but courageous
men engaged in a life-and-death struggle with nomadic hordes, and
later with internal enemies, Poles and rebels. The greater refinement
of the women of Little Russia is attributable to the comparative
ease of their lives in a fertile country, with a climate more genial
than that of the more northerly parts of the empire. There the
Great and the White Russians had to contend with a soil much less
productive, with swamps which had to be drained, with thick forests
which had to be cleared, with wild beasts which had to be destroyed
or guarded against, and with frost and snow that left scarcely
four months in the year for labour in the field.

The upper classes of South Russia, enriched by the cultivation of
large and fertile estates, and favoured in their social development
by long contact with the ancient Western civilization of Poland,
exhibit a similar superiority over the bulk of their compeers in
Great Russia. Except, however, in the case of the larger landed
proprietors, the everyday life of the Southern Russian bears a strong
resemblance to that of the Irish squireen. There is a strong tinge
of the same _insouciance_ as to the material future, and an equal
propensity to reckless hospitality, to sport (principally coursing),
social jollification, and to a great extent to card-playing. Indeed,
there are well-appointed country seats in the South of Russia in
which the long summer days are entirely spent in card-playing, with
interruptions only for meals. There are horses in plenty in the stable,
and vehicles of every description to which they can be harnessed;
but "taking a drive" through endless cornfields along natural roads
or tracks, parched, cracked, and dusty one day, and presenting
the next a surface of black mud, offers but few attractions to the
ladies, and vehicular locomotion is therefore resorted to only
as a matter of necessity, on journeys to estates or towns often
fifty to one hundred miles distant. Country life, indeed, has no
great attractions in any part of Russia Proper, and ever since the
Emancipation of the Serfs and the accompanying extinction