In his commune, a peasant may hope to pass through the dreary existence led by his mule and ox; his thoughts given up to his cabbage-soup, his buckwheat porridge, his loaf of black bread, and his darling dram. If he acquires in his village some patriarchal virtues--love of home, respect for age, delight in tales and songs, and preference for oral over written law--he also learns, without knowing why, to think and feel like a Bedouin in his tent, and a Kirghiz on his steppe. A rustic is nearly always humming old tunes. Whether you see him felling his pine, unloading his team, or sitting at his door, he is nearly always singing the same old dirge of love or war. When he breaks into a brisker stave, it is always into a song of revenge and hate. Bandits are his heroes; and the staid young fellow who dares not whisper to his partner in a dance, will roar out such a riotous squall: "I'll toil in the fields no more! For what can I gain by the spade? My hands are empty, my heart is sore; A knife! my friend's in the forest glade!" Another youth may sing: "I'll rob the merchant at his stall, I'll slay the noble in his hall; With girls and whisky I'll have my fling, And the world will honor me like a king." One of the most popular of these robber songs has a chorus running thus, addressed in menace to the noble and the rich: "We have come to drink your wine, We have come to steal your gold, We have come to kiss your wives! Ha! ha!" This reckless sense of right and wrong is due to that serfage under which the peasants groaned for two hundred and sixty years. Serfage made men indifferent to life and death. The crimes of serfage have scarcely any parallel, except among savage tribes; and the liberty which some of the freed peasants enjoyed the most was the liberty of revenge. Ivan Gorski was living in Tamboff, in very close friendship with a family of seven persons, when he conceived a grudge against them on some unknown ground, obtained a gun, and asked his friends to let him practice firing in their yard. They let him put up his target, and blaze away till he became a very fair shot, and people got used to the noise of his gun. When these two points were gained, he took off every member of the house. He could not tell the reason of his crime.