When one is searching for curious types it generally happens that you find one under your very nose. This was my case the other day. There is in the village another school which has lately been built for the factory children by the Government. I strolled into it and was received by a young schoolmaster with long black hair who was conducting, in the same room, three separate classes of children of different ages, to which he was respectively and simultaneously teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic (_i.e._, reading to one class, writing to the second, and arithmetic to the third). In the interval between two lessons he took me into his room and talked. His room was next to the schoolroom. It was like the school, made of oak boards, neither papered nor carpeted. There was no furniture in his sitting-room, except a tiny table and a stool, and in a further room no furniture at all except a violin on the floor. The Government had given the wood with which to build the school, he said; and when it arrived the peasants whose children were to go to the school had begun to saw and build, and then had refused to go on with the work. However, it was eventually built. “Who supports it?” I asked. “Well,” he answered, “at present the Government have no funds for schools, and the peasants refuse to pay for it, so I have to support it myself. The expenses are not great.” His salary consists of £36 a year, out of which he supplies the school-books and paper, pens, &c. He seemed to like his work and to take a great interest in the peasants. “The factory peasants are far more developed than the ordinary peasants,” he said. “Some of them take an interest in astronomy. But the peasants are dark people, difficult to get to know, and infinitely cunning.” “Do you play the violin?” I asked, pointing to the violin case. “Yes,” he answered, “but I don’t know how I play.” I have never seen so poignant a symbol of loneliness and the absence of the comforts of life as this young schoolmaster in his bare wooden room. He seemed, however, perfectly cheerful, and said that his present situation was a great improvement on the last one, which had been a mastership in a school near Morshansk, where he slept in the same room as forty other people, and where in winter the atmosphere was so thick at night that they had to open the door. To this the bare room with the violin on the floor seemed indeed preferable. CHAPTER XIV THE ELECTIONS MOSCOW, _March 19th_.