The question, whether the serf is so far cured of his Tartar habit that he can live a settled life without being bound to his patch of ground, is still unasked. The answer to that question must come with time, province by province and town by town. Nature is slow, and habit is a growth. Reform must wait on nature, and observe her laws. As in all such grand reforms, the parties most affected by the change were much dissatisfied at first. The serf had got too much; the lords had kept too much. In many provinces the peasants refused to hear the imperial rescript read in church. They said the priest was keeping them in the dark; for, ruled by the nobles, and playing a false part against the Emperor, he was holding back the real letters of liberation, and reading them papers forged by their lords. Fanatics and impostors took advantage of their discontent to excite sedition, and these fanatics and impostors met with some success in provinces occupied by the Poles and Malo-Russ. Two of these risings were important. At the village of Bezdna, province of Kazan, one Anton Petrof announced himself as a prophet of God and an ambassador from the Tsar. He told the peasants that they were now free men, and that their good Emperor had given them all the land. Four thousand rustics followed him about; and when General Count Apraxine, overtaking the mob and calling upon them to give up their leader, and disperse under pain of being instantly shot down, the poor fellows cried, "We shall not give him up; we are all for the Tsar." Apraxine gave the word to fire; a hundred men dropped down with bullets in their bodies--fifty-one dead, the others badly hurt. In horror of this butchery, the people cried, "You are firing into Alexander Nicolaivitch himself!" Petrof was taken, tried by court-martial, and shot in the presence of his stupefied friends, who could not understand that a soldier was doing his duty to the crown by firing into masses of unarmed men.