f the top of the huge stone
or brick stove, or on a platform laid close up under the ceiling on
beams extending from the stove to the opposite wall of the living-room.
The place on the stove is reserved for the aged and the babies. It was
the best bed in the house and was often proffered to the American with
true hospitality to the stranger. The bed-clothes consist of blankets,
quilts and sometimes robes of skins. Some of the patch-work quilts are
examples of wonderful needle-work. In the day-time it is usual to see
the pallets and rolls of bedding stored on the platform just mentioned,
which is almost always just over the low, heavy door leading in from the
outer hall to the main living-room.

In North Russia the one-room house is decidedly the exception, and
because of the influence of the deep snows on the customs of the people
probably half the houses have two stories. One large roof covers both
the home and the barn. The second story of the barn part can be used for
stock, but is usually the mow or store-room for hay, grains, cured meat
and fish, nets and implements, and is approached by an inclined runway
of logs up which the stocky little horses draw loaded wagons or sleds.
When the snow is real deep the runway is sometimes unnecessary. The mow
is entered through a door direct from the second story of the home part
of the building, and the stable similarly from the ground floor.

The central object, and the most curious to an American, in the whole
house is the huge Russian stove. In the larger houses there are several.
These stoves are constructed of masonry and are built before the
partitions of the house are put in and before the walls are completed.
In the main stove there are three fire-boxes and a maze of surrounding
air-spaces and smoke-passages, and surmounting all a great chimney which
in two-story houses is itself made into a heating-stove with one
fire-box for the upper rooms. When the house is to be heated a little
door is opened near the base of the chimney and a damper-plate is
removed, so that the draft will be direct and the smoke escape freely
into the chimney after quite a circuitous passage through the body of
the stove. A certain bunch of sergeants nearly asphyxiated themselves
before they discovered the secret of the damper in the stove. They were
nearly pickled in pine smoke. And a whole company of soldiers nearly
lost their billet in Kholmogori when they started up the sisters' stoves
with