They get their living from the soil in a very short season, and this is possible only because the summer day is twenty-four hours long. This means that in the short growing season the crops grow very rapidly, and it also means that all the work has to be done in that limited time. If the crops grow twenty-four or twenty-two or twenty hours, then the peasant must work the harder. The wife and mother and children must also work. Most of the farm work is done by each family for itself, but some of it is done by the whole village co-operatively. I spent a half-day working in a hayfield with peasants from Konetsgory who were eight versts from home. There were seventy-five of them, men, women, and children, and they stayed in that field five days and nights until the great stacks were finished. The hay was community property to which each family had a right in proportion to the number in the family. I noticed that they ate by families while at this work, the food being strictly private property. And I saw Mrs. "Smith" give Mrs. "Jones" some of her fresh cake, and other little private property courtesies. I asked if the families at Konetsgory not represented by workers in the field would have a right to any of the hay. Of course they would, because they were doing other work as directed by the staroster. The staroster is a public official chosen by a meeting of the peasants whose duty it is to assess labor for any public or co-operative purpose. His assessments are compulsory upon men, women, children, and horses. With most of the men in the army, as is now and has been the case for so long, his chief labor resource of course is women. When there are exceptions to his authority such as doctors and school teachers, these persons do not count in the distributions of the co-operative products. In all distributions of land and products now women are counted. This is a result of the revolution and has been brought about not because it was legislated but as a spontaneous product of the common sense of right. When Russia does have an election, as we must hope some day she will, these peasant people all assume as a matter of course that women will vote. Americans do not need to be told how backward Russia is in the matter of machinery and especially agricultural machinery. But I gave myself a surprise one day by going to every house in a small village and finding in every house but one a one-horse cast-steel modern plow. I found also some very good harrows and a few hand-wheel sewing machines, but practically nothing else that could be called modern. I have since seen two mowing machines and one hay-rake. The absence of machinery here is practically as universal as it has been represented. There is no prejudice against it and the people are not ignorant of it. They want it, and they have plenty of money to buy it with, but it is not here to buy, and the money has uncertain value.