These heroes Volgá and Ilyá and the rest lived very long ago, and their great city was not Petrograd but Kiev (Kieff). Petrograd means “Peter’s fortified town,” and we all know how till the war it used to be called Peters-burg. But if you look on the map you will find no Petrograd, only Kiev on the river Dnieper, which winds down to the Black Sea. The old Russian heroes used to sail down the river on through the Black Sea down to Constantinople, and there of course they met the Greeks, and the Greeks taught them to be Christians. That was in the days of good King Vladímir, and he was reigning before our William the Conqueror, hundreds of years before Peter the Great came to Holland and England and learnt to build boats, and made the great city of Petrograd. But though the heroes lived so long ago, they are never forgotten. The Russian children in the village schools learn about Volgá and Ilyá as soon as they can read, and old minstrels in far away villages beyond lake Onéga and even in Siberia sing the Byliny, the songs of What-has-Been to the peasants as they sit round the fire at night. I have seen a picture of one of these singers, an old peasant over seventy, with a long white beard and shaggy hair and bright deep-set eyes. He could not write or read, and his voice was rather cracked, but when he sang the old songs he was all on fire, and he sang them so splendidly that the villagers crowded round to hear. The old men say that the young ones will not learn to sing the songs because they are gramotnye, “grammar-people,” who read books and learn to write—what a pity. A learned Russian called Hilferding went to North Russia to live among the peasants and listen to these stories. The peasants are very poor, and are shy with strangers, but they learned to love and trust Hilferding, and sang their songs to him. It is nice to know that he was able to help the peasants, and get them a little more money and food. Other learned men had been before Hilferding, but nearly all the stories in this book were collected by him, so we like to remember his name. It is the peasants who sing the Byliny, not the nobles, and two of the greatest Russian heroes, Ilyá and Mikúla, are peasants’ sons. Mikúla is a ploughman. It sounds strange to us that a ploughman should be a hero; but the Russians did not feel like that. They love their land with all their hearts. Some of it has very black fertile soil, but some of it is very hard and full of stones, and sometimes of forests to be cleared, and the man who does all this is a hero. The Russians sing a hymn to the honour of Mikúla; it ends “Glory to thee, good Mikúla, the peasant who worked.” In one of the pictures you see Volgá, the prince, come to beg Mikúla to leave his plough and join his warriors. Mikúla was sad, but a man must leave even his work to defend his country. Mikúla is my favourite of all the heroes.