The peasants of North Russia are generally supposed to be the poorest and least progressive class of Russians, living in the poorest and least desirable part of the country. I think that if this is true the interest which all Russia holds for Americans can hardly be exaggerated. The people of North Russia are peasants. The professional and trading classes are negligible—perhaps smaller than anywhere else in the white world. The towns are small and few and even the towns are peopled largely by peasants. North Russia, humanly speaking, consists of long tortuous arteries of life called rivers. The banks of these rivers are thickly, almost densely, populated. Villages of from twenty to a hundred houses are strung along so continuously and here and there clustered about a great church so thickly that you wonder where there is land for all these people to cultivate. Never, however, do you find an isolated settler. If it is a forest nobody lives there. You find a village or nobody. There can be no more hospitable people anywhere in the world than these Russian people are. Their doors are never closed against strangers, and with unfailing courtesy they offer the best they have. I have traveled nearly a thousand versts by sled over this northern country and stopped every six hours at a private house for a samovar and perhaps a bed. To have the best the house afforded given me once or twice and pay refused would not have impressed me so much, but to have uniform hospitality extended me as though it were my right and to have this done without consciousness of virtue made me feel that the world’s championship in hospitality abides with the people of this bleak and inhospitable country. [Illustration: The women work in the fields with the men. Russians love their homes and their villages devotedly.]