s time wore on, and his father became older and frailer, Ivan's visits
to his native place became longer and more frequent, and when the old
man was at last incapable of work, Ivan settled down permanently and
undertook the direction of the household. In the meantime his
own children had been growing up. When I knew the family it
comprised--besides two daughters who had married early and gone to
live with their parents-in-law--Ivan and his wife, two sons, three
daughters-in-law, and an indefinite and frequently varying number of
grandchildren. The fact that there were three daughters-in-law and only
two sons was the result of the Conscription, which had taken away the
youngest son shortly after his marriage. The two who remained spent only
a small part of the year at home. The one was a carpenter and the
other a bricklayer, and both wandered about the country in search of
employment, as their father had done in his younger days. There was,
however, one difference. The father had always shown a leaning towards
commercial transactions, rather than the simple practice of his
handicraft, and consequently he had usually lived and travelled alone.
The sons, on the contrary, confined themselves to their handicrafts, and
were always during the working season members of an artel.

The artel in its various forms is a curious institution. Those to which
Ivan's sons belonged were simply temporary, itinerant associations of
workmen, who during the summer lived together, fed together, worked
together, and periodically divided amongst themselves the profits. This
is the primitive form of the institution, and is now not very often met
with. Here, as elsewhere, capital has made itself felt, and destroyed
that equality which exists among the members of an artel in the above
sense of the word. Instead of forming themselves into a temporary
association, the workmen now generally make an engagement with a
contractor who has a little capital, and receive from him fixed monthly
wages. The only association which exists in this case is for the
purchase and preparation of provisions, and even these duties are very
often left to the contractor.

In some of the larger towns there are artels of a much more complex
kind--permanent associations, possessing a large capital, and
pecuniarily responsible for the acts of the individual members. Of
these, by far the most celebrated is that of the Bank Porters. These men
have unlimited opportunities of ste