of punctuality--viz., the demands made upon him by his family, and particularly by his wife. 'Give her a good thrashing,' is the advice of the mayor. The mujik goes home, ties his wife by her hair to the tail of a cart, and flogs her unmercifully with a whip. At a convenient opportunity he will give his mother a knock or two on the head with a log of wood. If any member of the family should die from privation, his death is attributed to fate." Passing to the description of a village community of higher civilization, the author continues: "The chief features of such a village are fewer thrashings, a more perceptible tendency to personal adornment on the part of the women, a larger number of bachelors, and the existence even of old maids--_i. e._, in the sense only of unmarried women. In such villages _fetes_ are held each Sunday, and all the village games, accompanied by much kissing, terminate in the coarsest sensuality. Immorality prevails, followed by infanticide." (_Condition of the Laboring Classes of Russia_, by N. Flerofski, 1869.) For the sake of obtaining an additional laborer in the family it was customary for the Russian serf to marry his son of tender years to a woman of riper age, particularly in households where the father had become a widower, and where, consequently, the family had lost a female laborer. The son was then sent out to work in the fields, and this circumstance, together with the subjection and degradation of women in a social organization in which even the man was a mere chattel, favored the existence of a crime that greatly complicated the relations of blood in a peasant family, and often led to the brutal treatment of helpless wives by infuriated husbands. Nor did the evil stop even with a partial amelioration of the cause, but tended for a time to reproduce itself; for the son, grown to a ripe age and bound to a wife now old and wrinkled, would revenge himself by treating his own son in the manner in which he had been treated himself.