to my amazement, he had never heard of the Leshi and the Vodyanoi, the wood-king and water-king of the folk-tales.  At all events, he had never seen them, nor heard their weird frolics in the boughs and waves.  The Mordvinian contributed to the entertainment by telling us of his people’s costumes and habits, and gave us a lesson in his language, which was of the Tatar-Finnish variety.  Like the Tchuvashi and other tribes here on the Volga, the Mordvinians furnish pleasurable excitement and bewilderment to ethnographists and students of religions.

These simple amusements came to an end all too soon, despite the rain.  We were seized with a fancy to try the peasant telyega for the descent, and packed ourselves in with the rug and utensils.  Our Mordvinian, swarthy and gray-eyed, walked beside us, casting glances of inquiry at us, as the shaggy little horse plunged along, to ascertain our degrees of satisfaction with the experiment.  He thrust the dripping boughs from our faces with graceful, natural courtesy; and when we alighted, breathless and shaken to a pulp, at the forester’s hut, where our carriages awaited us, he picked up the hairpins and gave them to us gravely, one by one, as needed.  We were so entirely content with our telyega experience that we were in no undue haste to repeat it.  We drove home in the persistent rain, which had affected neither our bodies nor our spirits, bearing a trophy of unfringed gentians to add to our collection of goldenrod, harebells, rose-colored fringed pinks, and other familiar wild flowers which reminded us of the western hemisphere.

The days were too brief for our delights.  In the afternoons and evenings, we took breezy gallops through the forests, along the boundary sward of the fields, across the rich black soil of that third of the land which, in the “three-field” system of cultivation, is allowed to lie fallow after it has borne a crop of winter grain, rye, and one of summer grain, oats.  We watched the peasants plowing or scattering the seed-corn, or returning, mounted side-saddle fashion on their horses, with their primitive plows reversed.  Only such rich land could tolerate these Adam-like earth-scratchers.  As we met the cows on their way home from pasture, we took observations, to verify the whimsical barometer of the peasants; and we found that if a light-hued cow headed the procession the next day really was pretty sure to be fair, while a dark cow brought foul weather.  As the twilight deepened, the quail piped under the very hoofs of our horses; the moon rose over the forest, which would soon ring with the howl of wolves; the fresh breath of the river came to us laden with peculiar scents, through which penetrated the heavy odor of the green-black hemp.