Another winter occupation which was formerly practised, and has now almost fallen into disuse, was that of stealing wood in the forest.  This was, according to peasant morality, no sin, or at most a very venial offence, for God plants and waters the trees, and therefore forests belong properly to no one.  So thought the peasantry, but the landed proprietors and the Administration of the Domains held a different theory of property, and consequently precautions had to be taken to avoid detection.  In order to ensure success it was necessary to choose a night when there was a violent snowstorm, which would immediately obliterate all traces of the expedition; and when such a night was found, the operation was commonly performed with success.  During the hours of darkness a tree would be felled, stripped of its branches, dragged into the village, and cut up into firewood, and at sunrise the actors would be tranquilly sleeping on the stove as if they had spent the night at home.  In recent years the judicial authorities have done much towards putting down this practice and eradicating the loose conceptions of property with which it was connected.

For the female part of the population the winter used to be a busy time, for it was during these four or five months that the spinning and weaving had to be done, but now the big factories, with their cheap methods of production, are rapidly killing the home industries, and the young girls are not learning to work at the jenny and the loom as their mothers and grandmothers did.

In many of the northern villages, where ancient usages happen to be preserved, the tedium of the long winter evenings is relieved by so-called Besedy, a word which signifies literally conversazioni.  A Beseda, however, is not exactly a conversazione as we understand the term, but resembles rather what is by some ladies called a Dorcas meeting, with this essential difference, that those present work for themselves and not for any benevolent purposes.  In some villages as many as three Besedy regularly assemble about sunset; one for the children, the second for the young people, and the third for the matrons.  Each of the three has its peculiar character.  In the first, the children work and amuse themselves under the superintendence of an old woman, who trims the torch* and endeavours to keep order.  The little girls spin flax in a primitive way without the aid of a jenny, and the boys, who are, on the whole, much less industrious, make simple bits of wicker-work.  Formerly—­I mean within my own recollection—­many of them used to make rude shoes of plaited bark, called lapty, but these are being rapidly supplanted by leather boots.  These occupations do not prevent an almost incessant hum of talk, frequent discordant attempts to sing in chorus, and occasional quarrels requiring the energetic interference of the old woman who controls the proceedings.  To amuse her noisy flock she sometimes relates to them, for the hundredth time, one of those wonderful old stories that lose nothing by repetition, and all listen to her attentively, as if they had never heard the story before.