starve.  In his generation the poor man thinks himself wise.  In Russia, however, things are managed differently.  The poor man is under the heel of the rich.  Some day there will be in Russia a Terror, but not yet.  Some day the moujik will erect unto himself a rough sort of a guillotine, but not in our day.  Perhaps some of us who are young men now may dimly read in our dotage of a great upheaval beside which the Terror of France will be tame and uneventful.  Who can tell?  When a country begins to grow, its mental development is often startlingly rapid.

But we have to do with Russia of to-day, and the village of Osterno in the Government of Tver.  Not a “famine” Government, mind you!  For these are the Volga Provinces—­Samara, Pensa, Voronish, Vintka, and a dozen others.  No!  Tver the civilized, the prosperous, the manufacturing centre.

Osterno is built of wood.  Should it once fairly catch alight in a high wind, all that will be left of this town will be a few charred timbers and some dazed human beings.  The inhabitants know their own danger, and endeavor to meet it in their fatalistic manner.  Each village has its fire organization.  Each “soul” has his appointed place, his appointed duty, and his special contribution—­be it bucket or rope or ladder—­to bring to the conflagration.  But no one ever dreams of being sober and vigilant at the right time, so the organization, like many larger such, is a broken reed.

The street, bounded on either side by low wooden houses, is, singularly enough, well paved.  This, the traveller is told, by the tyrant Prince Pavlo, who made the road because he did not like driving over ruts and through puddles—­the usual Russian rural thoroughfare.  Not because Prince Pavlo wanted to give the peasants work, not because he wanted to save them from starvation—­not at all, although, in the gratification of his own whim, he happened to render those trifling services; but merely because he was a great “barin”—­a prince who could have any thing he desired.  Had not the other barin—­Steinmetz by name—­superintended the work?  Steinmetz the hated, the loathed, the tool of the tyrant whom they never see.  Ask the “starost”—­the mayor of the village.  He knows the barins, and hates them.

Michael Roon, the starosta or elder of Osterno, president of the Mir, or village council, principal shopkeeper, mayor and only intelligent soul of the nine hundred, probably had Tartar blood in his veins.  To this strain may be attributed the narrow Tartar face, the keen black eyes, the short, spare figure which many remember to this day, although Michael Roon has been dead these many years.

Removed far above the majority of his fellow-villagers in intelligence and energy, this man administered the law of his own will to his colleagues on the village council.

It was late in the autumn, one evening remembered by many for its death-roll, that the starosta was standing at the door of his small shop.  He was apparently idle.  He never sold vodka, and the majority of the villagers were in one of the three thriving “kabaks” which drove a famous trade in strong drink and weak tea.  It was a very hot evening.  The sun had set in a pink haze which was now turning to an unhealthy gray, and spreading over the face of the western sky like the shadow of death across the human countenance.