armed with their hatchets, proceed to some spot in the woods previously fixed upon.  Here they begin to make a clearing.  This is no easy matter, for tree-felling is hard and tedious work; but the process does not take so much time as might be expected, for the workmen have been brought up to the trade, and wield their axes with marvellous dexterity.  When they have felled all the trees, great and small, they return to their homes, and think no more about their clearing till the autumn, when they return, in order to strip the fallen trees of the branches, to pick out what they require for building purposes or firewood, and to pile up the remainder in heaps.  The logs for building or firewood are dragged away by horses as soon as the first fall of snow has made a good slippery road, but the piles are allowed to remain till the following spring, when they are stirred up with long poles and ignited.  The flames rapidly spread in all directions till they join together and form a gigantic bonfire, such as is never seen in more densely-populated countries.  If the fire does its work properly, the whole of the space is covered with a layer of ashes; and when these have been slightly mixed with soil by means of a light plough, the seed is sown.

On the field prepared in this original fashion is sown barley, rye, or flax, and the harvests, nearly always good, sometimes border on the miraculous.  Barley or rye may be expected to produce about sixfold in ordinary years, and they may produce as much as thirty-fold under peculiarly favourable circumstances.  The fertility is, however, short-lived.  If the soil is poor and stony, not more than two crops can be raised; if it is of a better quality, it may give tolerable harvests for six or seven successive years.  In most countries this would be an absurdly expensive way of manuring, for wood is much too valuable a commodity to be used for such a purpose; but in this northern region the forests are boundless, and in the districts where there is no river or stream by which timber may be floated, the trees not used in this way rot from old age.  Under these circumstances the system is reasonable, but it must be admitted that it does not give a very large return for the amount of labour expended, and in bad seasons it gives almost no return at all.

The other sources of revenue are scarcely less precarious.  With his gun and a little parcel of provisions the peasant wanders about in the trackless forests, and too often returns after many days with a very light bag; or he starts in autumn for some distant lake, and comes back after five or six weeks with nothing better than perch and pike.  Sometimes he tries his luck at deep-sea fishing.  In this case he starts in February—­probably on foot—­for Kem, on the shore of the White Sea, or perhaps for the more distant Kola, situated on a small river which falls into the Arctic Ocean.  There, in company with three or four comrades, he starts on a fishing