The plain is dotted with villages, and one village is very like another. They consist generally of two rows of houses, forming what does duty for a street, but the word street would be as misleading as possible in this case. It would be more exact to say an exceedingly broad expanse of earth: dusty in summer, and in spring and autumn a swamp of deep soaking black mud. The houses, at irregular intervals, sometimes huddled close together, sometimes with wide gaps between them, succeed each other (the gaps probably caused by the fact that the houses which were there have been burnt). They are made of logs, thatched with straw; sometimes (but rarely) they are made of bricks and roofed with iron. As a rule they look as if they had been built by Robinson Crusoe. The road is strewn with straw and rich in abundance of every kind of mess. Every now and then there is a well of the primitive kind which we see on the banks of the Nile, and which one imagines to be of the same pattern as those from which the people in the Old Testament drew their water. The roads are generally peopled with peasants driving at a leisurely walk in winter in big wooden sledges and in summer in big wooden carts. Often the cart is going on by itself with somebody in the extreme distance every now and then grunting at the horse. A plain, a village, a church, every now and then a wood of birch-trees, every now and then a stream, a weir, and a broken-down lock. A great deal of dirt, a great deal of moisture. An overwhelming feeling of space and leisureliness, a sense that nothing you could say or do could possibly hurry anybody or anything, or make the lazy, creaking wheels of life go faster—that is, I think, the picture which arises first in my mind when I think of the Russian country.