much after the fashion of Digger Indians, and suckle
them through an opening in the second or middle story. Doubtless this
is a convenient arrangement, but it presents the curious anomaly of a
poor peasant living in a one-story house with a three-story wife.
According to the prevailing style of architecture in well-wooded
countries, these women ought to wear their hair shingled; but they
generally tie it up in a knot behind, or cover it with a fancy-colored
handkerchief, on the presumption, I suppose, that they look less
barbarous in that way than they would with shingled heads. You may
suspect me of story-telling, but upon my word I think three-story
women are extravagant enough without adding another to them. I only
hope their garrets contain a better quality of furniture than that
which afflicts the male members of the Mujik community. No wonder
those poor women have families of children like steps of stairs! It is
said that their husbands are often very cruel to them, and think
nothing of knocking them down and beating them; but even that does not
surprise me. How can a man be expected to get along with a three-story
wife unless he floors her occasionally?

Ragged little boys, prematurely arrested in their growth, you see too,
in myriads--shovel-nosed and bare-legged urchins of hideously
eccentric manners, carrying around big bottles of _sbiteen_ (a kind of
mead), which they are continually pouring out into glasses, to appease
the chronic thirst with which the public seem to be afflicted; and
groups of the natives gathered around a cucumber stand, devouring
great piles of unwholesome-looking cucumbers, which skinny old women
are dipping up out of wooden buckets. The voracity with which all
classes stow away these vicious edibles in their stomachs is amazing,
and suggests a melancholy train of reflections on the subject of
cholera morbus. It was a continual matter of wonder to me how the
lower classes of Russians survived the horrid messes with which they
tortured their digestive apparatus. Only think of thousands of men
dining every day on black bread, heavy enough for bullets, a pound or
two of grease, and half a peck of raw cucumbers per man, and then
expecting to live until next morning! And yet they do live, and grow
fat, and generally die at a good old age, in case they are not killed
in battle, or frozen up in the wilds of Siberia.

Outside the walls of the Katai Gorod, in an open square, or plaza, are
rows