“This is the Dukhobor Society’s trading store, where we have wholesale and retail departments for the sale of dry goods, hardware, leather, boots and shoes, groceries, crockery, farm implements, etc. We have seven grist mills, including one of 400 horse-power; three brickyards, where over seven million bricks have been made; about 800 horses; 800 head of cattle; twenty-five threshing machines; a number of barns and stables, and a fine assortment of ploughs, harrows, and other agricultural machinery. We have 13,000 acres in Saskatchewan, it being worth at least thirty dollars an acre, and the Society has now bought 15,000 acres in British Columbia—at Castlegar, about thirty miles south of Nelson—where a beginning has been made with fruit-farming. So you will see that our community, which numbers between seven and eight thousand persons, has become rich. The people who have made trouble for us are not many—not quite a hundred—and they do not belong to us, and we do not like what they do. Their Russian name would be called in English: The Men Without Any Clothes. We hope they will not make any more bother.” Said the jovial Scotch miller, when I afterwards sat chatting with him in his cosy parlour: “I have a lot to do with the Dukhobors, and you may take it from me they are very nice people. As for the wild, fanatical set that sometimes go about with no clothes on, well, they are just the eccentric ones, and they don’t belong to the regular Society. One day I found a long-haired individual in the mill among those that work for me, a-whispering and talking away at ’em fit to beat the band. I saw what his game was—getting up one of those naked-crusade outfits to make a lot more bother. So I took and ran him out of the mill. They are normally as quiet, harmless, and industrious a people as you could meet anywhere. And such simple tastes they’ve got, too! Did you see that little patch of sunflowers along the road? Well, they grow them for their own food, and they munch away at the ripe seed as contentedly as possible. I tried those seeds once—but never again. A cut from the joint with some nice gravy is more in my line. All the same, you can’t help respecting them for their principles, especially when they are always so nicely behaved. And as for Mr. Verigin and the other heads of the Society, you couldn’t want to do business with nicer and more straightforward gentlemen.”