The mill stands at the western end of a broad reach of the same stream which traverses the realm of frogs; the waters, held up by a dam, are as still and motionless as a standing pond, and yet they once had turned the mill wheel, although, no doubt, they had always seemed to sleep. A village begins here where the waters broaden; three years ago it was a straggling street of squalid houses, where peasants dwelt in the intervals of laborious days. Rumanian peasants, at this period, lived under laws which left them little liberty, and gave them few delights. Their toil accumulated riches for their masters, the hereditary owners of the soil, while they eked out a scanty livelihood, and though in name free men, in fact they were half slaves. Peasants when slaves are seldom rebels. Spartacus has won a place in history by being the exception to the rule, a rule well known to men who never read a book, but feel instinctively that they themselves are helpless to redress their wrongs. Such is the bitter truth, and those who should know better often presume on it, until their victims, exasperated by neglect and insolence, lose for a while the habit of forbearance, flame into sudden anger, indulge in fierce reprisals, and when exhaustion follows relapse into dull despair. Wrongs unredressed resemble pent-up waters, which seek an outlet, useful or wasteful as the case may be, and finding none, in time they sweep away the stoutest dam, causing widespread destruction by their dissipated force. In 1907 a large number of Rumanian peasants had revolted. Order, so-called, had been restored by employing other peasants, clothed in uniforms, to shoot their fellow-sufferers down. The tragedy of violence and repression was of but short duration; once more the peasants resigned themselves to fate, once more their smouldering passions were pent up by a dam of military force.