f the population that begins to suffer from lack
of food when, for any reason, there is complete or partial failure of
the crops. Twenty million people, in twenty-two provinces, were
reduced to absolute starvation by the famine of 1906, and were kept
alive only by governmental relief on a colossal scale. Famine is
predicted again this year in the provinces of Kaluga, Tula, Tambof,
Samara, Saratof, Viatka, Poltava, and Chernigof. In the province last
named the peasants were already mixing weeds with their rye flour in
November, 1907. (_Nasha Zhizn_, St. Petersburg, May 23. 1906; _Russian
Thought_, St. Petersburg, December, 1907, p. 217.)

[33] Report of the Zemstvo Committee on Agricultural Needs in the
District of Voronezh, Stuttgart, 1903. This report was published in
pamphlet form abroad, because the censor would not allow it to be
printed in Russia.

[34] Report of the Zemstvo Committee on Agricultural Needs in the
District of Voronezh, pp. 33, 34, Stuttgart, 1903.

[35] _Russian Thought_, St. Petersburg. June, 1907, p. 169.

[36] _Russian Thought_, St. Petersburg, June, 1907, p. 124.

[37] Report of the Russian Statistical Department, 1905; and Report to
the Council of Ministers on the state of schools, _Strana_, St.
Petersburg, August 23, 1906.

[38] _Strana_, edited by Professor Maxim Kovalefski, St. Petersburg,
October 7 and 10, 1906.

[39] _Tovarishch_, St. Petersburg, August 26, 1906.

[40] V. Polozof, in _Strana_, St. Petersburg, October 18, 1906.

[Illustration]

"THE HEART KNOWETH"

BY CHARLOTTE WILSON

Sometimes my little woe is lulled to rest,
Its clamor shamed by some old poet's page--
Tumult of hurrying hoof, and battle-rage,
And dying knight, and trampled warrior-crest.
Stern faces, old heroic souls unblest,
Eye me with scorn, as they my grief would gage,
A mere child, schooled to weep upon the stage,
Tricked for a part of woe and somber-drest.
"Lo, who art thou," they ask, "that thou shouldst fret
To find, forsooth, one single heart undone?
The page thou turnest there is purple-wet
With blood that gushed from Caesar overthrown!
Lo, who art thou to prate of sorrow?" Yet,
This little woe, it is my own, my own!

IN THE DARK HOUR

BY PERCEVAL GIBBON

The house overlooked the starlit bay, nearly ringed with a sparse
fence of palms, and on its roof, a little scarlet figure on the white
rugs, Incarnacion sat wait