Near the house where I am living there is a village; as this village is so close to the town of Moscow I thought that its inhabitants would be suburban, and therefore not representative of peasant life. This is not so. The nearness to Moscow seems to make no difference at all. I was walking through the village on Saturday morning when a peasant who was sitting on his doorstep called me and asked me if I would like to eat an apple. I accepted his invitation. He said he presumed I was living with X., as other Englishmen had lived there before. Then he asked abruptly, “Is Marie Alexandrovna in your place?” I said my hostess’s name was Marie Karlovna. “Of course,” he said, “I don’t mean here, but in your place, in your country.” I didn’t understand. Then he said it again very loud, and asked if I was deaf. I said I wasn’t deaf and that I understood what he said, but I did not know to whom he was alluding. “Talking to you,” he said, “is like talking to a Tartar. You look at one and don’t understand what one says.” Then it suddenly flashed on me that he was alluding to the Queen of England. “You mean Queen Alexandra,” I said, “the sister of the Empress Marie Feodorovna.” “That’s what I mean,” he said. It afterwards appeared that he considered that England had been semi-Russianised owing to this relationship; he thought of course that both the Queen and the Empress were Russians. Two more peasants joined us, and one of them brought a small bottle (the size of a sample) of vodka and a plate of cherries. “We will go and drink this in the orchard,” they said. So we went to the orchard. “You have come here to learn,” said the first peasant, a bearded man, whose name was Feodor. “Many Englishmen have been here to learn. I taught one all the words that we use.” I said I was a correspondent; that I had just arrived from St. Petersburg, where I had attended the sittings of the Duma. “What about the Duma?” asked the other peasant. “They’ve sent it away. Will there be another one?” I said a manifesto spoke of a new one. “Yes,” said Feodor, “there is a manifesto abolishing punishments.” I said I hadn’t observed that clause. “Will they give us back our land?” asked Feodor. “All the land here belongs to us really.” Then followed a long explanation as to why the land belonged to them. It is the property, as a matter of fact, of the Crown. I said I did not know. “If they don’t give it back to us we shall take it,” he said simply. Then one of the other peasants added, “Those manifestoes are not written by the Emperor but by the ‘authorities.’” (The same thing was said to me by a cabman at St. Petersburg, his reason being that the Emperor would say “I,” whereas the manifesto said “We.”) Then they asked me why they had not won the war; and whether it was true that the war had been badly managed. “We know nothing,” he said. “What newspaper tells the truth? Where can we find the real truth? Is it to be found in the _Russkoe Slovo_?” (a big Moscow newspaper).