As I proceeded eastwards I noticed a change in the appearance of the villages.  The ordinary wooden houses, with their high sloping roofs, gradually gave place to flat-roofed huts, built of a peculiar kind of unburnt bricks, composed of mud and straw.  I noticed, too, that the population became less and less dense, and the amount of fallow land proportionately greater.  The peasants were evidently richer than those near the Volga, but they complained—­as the Russian peasant always does—­that they had not land enough.  In answer to my inquiries why they did not use the thousands of acres that were lying fallow around them, they explained that they had already raised crops on that land for several successive years, and that consequently they must now allow it to “rest.”

In one of the villages through which I passed I met with a very characteristic little incident.  The village was called Samovolnaya Ivanofka—­that is to say, “Ivanofka the Self-willed” or “the Non-authorised.”  Whilst our horses were being changed my travelling companion, in the course of conversation with a group of peasants, inquired about the origin of this extraordinary name, and discovered a curious bit of local history.  The founders of the village had settled on the land without the permission of the absentee owner, and obstinately resisted all attempts at eviction.  Again and again troops had been sent to drive them away, but as soon as the troops retired these “self-willed” people returned and resumed possession, till at last the proprietor, who lived in St. Petersburg or some other distant place, became weary of the contest and allowed them to remain.  The various incidents were related with much circumstantial detail, so that the narration lasted perhaps half an hour.  All this time I listened attentively, and when the story was finished I took out my note-book in order to jot down the facts, and asked in what year the affair had happened.  No answer was given to my question.  The peasants merely looked at each other in a significant way and kept silence.  Thinking that my question had not been understood, I asked it a second time, repeating a part of what had been related.  To my astonishment and utter discomfiture they all declared that they had never related anything of the sort!  In despair I appealed to my friend, and asked him whether my ears had deceived me—­whether I was labouring under some strange hallucination.  Without giving me any reply he simply smiled and turned away.

When we had left the village and were driving along in our tarantass the mystery was satisfactorily cleared up.  My friend explained to me that I had not at all misunderstood what had been related, but that my abrupt question and the sight of my note-book had suddenly aroused the peasants’ suspicions.  “They evidently suspected,” he continued, “that you were a tchinovnik, and that you wished to use to their detriment the knowledge you had acquired.  They thought it safer, therefore, at once to deny it all.  You don’t yet understand the Russian muzhik!”