and Dorothea element in their composition, and consequently know very little about those sentimental, romantic ideas which we habitually associate with the preliminary steps to matrimony.  Even those authors who endeavour to idealise peasant life have rarely ventured to make their story turn on a sentimental love affair.  Certainly in real life the wife is taken as a helpmate, or in plain language a worker, rather than as a companion, and the mother-in-law leaves her very little time to indulge in fruitless dreaming.

As 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.