apprentices one of these bands, I was informed by a bright-eyed youth of about sixteen that he had already made the journey twice, and intended to go every winter.  “And you always bring home a big pile of money with you?” I inquired.  “Nitchevo!” replied the little fellow, gaily, with an air of pride and self-confidence; “last year I brought home three roubles!” This answer was, at the moment, not altogether welcome, for I had just been discussing with a Russian fellow-traveller as to whether the peasantry can fairly be called industrious, and the boy’s reply enabled my antagonist to score a point against me.  “You hear that!” he said, triumphantly.  “A Russian peasant goes all the way to Siberia and back for three roubles!  Could you get an Englishman to work at that rate?” “Perhaps not,” I replied, evasively, thinking at the same time that if a youth were sent several times from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s House, and obliged to make the greater part of the journey in carts or on foot, he would probably expect, by way of remuneration for the time and labour expended, rather more than seven and sixpence!

Very often the peasants find industrial occupations without leaving home, for various industries which do not require complicated machinery are practised in the villages by the peasants and their families.  Wooden vessels, wrought iron, pottery, leather, rush-matting, and numerous other articles are thus produced in enormous quantities.  Occasionally we find not only a whole village, but even a whole district occupied almost exclusively with some one kind of manual industry.  In the province of Vladimir, for example, a large group of villages live by Icon-painting; in one locality near Nizhni-Novgorod nineteen villages are occupied with the manufacture of axes; round about Pavlovo, in the same province, eighty villages produce almost nothing but cutlery; and in a locality called Ouloma, on the borders of Novgorod and Tver, no less than two hundred villages live by nail-making.

These domestic industries have long existed, and were formerly an abundant source of revenue—­providing a certain compensation for the poverty of the soil.  But at present they are in a very critical position.  They belong to the primitive period of economic development, and that period in Russia, as I shall explain in a future chapter, is now rapidly drawing to a close.  Formerly the Head of a Household bought the raw material, had it worked up at home, and sold with a reasonable profit the manufactured articles at the bazaars, as the local fairs are called, or perhaps at the great annual yarmarkt* of Nizhni-Novgorod.  This primitive system is now rapidly becoming obsolete.  Capital and wholesale enterprise have come into the field and are revolutionising the old methods of production and trade.  Already whole groups of industrial villages have fallen under the power of middle-men, who advance money to the working households and fix the price of the products.  Attempts are frequently