and rioting away
all you have earned?"

"I would stay," he answered, "but I have my wife there in Russia."

"Your wife!" I exclaimed, stupidly surprised that the poor deformed
creature should have found a mate--as though there were not a
superfluity of mates in the world--"I didn't know you were married?"

"Yes, and I have two little children, and I don't know what they would
do if I were not to come home. But it is a very expensive journey to
Russia, and costs me every time seven marks."

"Seven marks!"

"Yes, it is a great sum."

I wondered whether I should be able to get to Russia for seven marks,
supposing I were to be seized with an unnatural craving to go there.

All the labourers who work here from March to December are Russians
and Poles, or a mixture of both. We send a man over who can speak their
language, to fetch as many as he can early in the year, and they arrive
with their bundles, men and women and babies, and as soon as they have
got here and had their fares paid, they disappear in the night if they
get the chance, sometimes fifty of them at a time, to go and work singly
or in couples for the peasants, who pay them a pfenning or two more a
day than we do, and let them eat with the family. From us they get a
mark and a half to two marks a day, and as many potatoes as they can
eat. The women get less, not because they work less, but because they
are women and must not be encouraged. The overseer lives with them, and
has a loaded revolver in his pocket and a savage dog at his heels.
For the first week or two after their arrival, the foresters and other
permanent officials keep guard at night over the houses they are put
into. I suppose they find it sleepy work; for certain it is that spring
after spring the same thing happens, fifty of them getting away in spite
of all our precautions, and we are left with our mouths open and much
out of pocket. This spring, by some mistake, they arrived without their
bundles, which had gone astray on the road, and, as they travel in their
best clothes, they refused utterly to work until their luggage came.
Nearly a week was lost waiting, to the despair of all in authority.

Nor will any persuasions induce them to do anything on Saints' days, and
there surely never was a church so full of them as the Russian Church.
In the spring, when every hour is of vital importance, the work is
constantly being interrupted by them, and the workers lie sleeping
in the sun the