Every one was quiet, clean, reverent.  The cloth-mill girls had discovered our (happily) obsolete magenta, and made themselves hideous in flounced petticoats and sacks of that dreadful hue.  The sister of our Lukerya, the maid who had been assigned to us, thus attired, felt distinctly superior.  Lukerya would have had the bad taste to follow her example, had she been permitted, so fast are evil fashions destroying the beautiful and practical national costumes.  Little did Lukerya dream that she, in her peasant garb, with her thick nose and rather unformed face, was a hundred times prettier than Annushka, with far finer features and “fashionable” dress.

Independent and “fashionable” as many of these villagers were, they were ready enough to appeal to their former owners in case of illness or need; and they were always welcomed.  Like most Russian women who spend any time on their estates, our hostess knew a good deal about medicine, which was necessitated by the circumstance that the district doctor lived eight miles away, and had such a wide circuit assigned to him that he could not be called in except for serious cases.  Many of the remedies available or approved by the peasants were primitive, not to say heroic.  For example, one man, who had exhausted all other remedies for rheumatism, was advised to go to the forest, thrust the ailing foot and leg into one of the huge ant-hills which abounded there, and allow the ants to sting him as long as he could bear the pain, for the sake of the formic acid which would thus be injected into the suffering limb.  I confess that I should have liked to be present at this bit of—­ surgery, shall I call it?  It would have been an opportunity for observing the Russian peasant’s stoicism and love of suffering as a thing good in itself.

The peasants came on other errands, also.  One morning we were startled, at our morning coffee, by the violent irruption into the dining-room, on his knees, of a man with clasped hands uplifted, rolling eyes, and hair wildly tossing, as he knocked his head on the floor, kissed our hostess’s gown, and uttered heart-rending appeals to her, to Heaven, and to all the saints. “Barynya! dear mistress!” he wailed.  “Forgive! Yay Bogu, it was not my fault.  The Virgin herself knows that the carpenter forced me to it.  I’ll never do it again, never.  God is my witness! Barynya!  Ba-a-rynya!  Ba-a-a-a-a-a-rynya!” in an indescribable, subdued howl.  He was one of her former serfs, the keeper of the dramshop; and the carpenter, that indispensable functionary on an isolated estate, had “drunk up” all his tools (which did not belong to him, but to our hostess) at this man’s establishment.  The sly publican did not offer to return them, and he would not have so much as condescended to promises for the misty future, had he not been aware that the law permits the closing of pothouses on the complaint of proprietors in just such predicaments as this, as well as on the vote of the peasant Commune.  Having won temporary respite by his well-acted anguish, he was ready to proceed again on the national plan of avos which may be vulgarly rendered into English by “running for luck.”