The outward aspect of a Russian village is not attractive, and there is little choice in the surrounding country between a wide grey plain with a distance of scrubby pine forest, or the scrubby pine forest with distant grey plains. The peasants' houses are scattered up and down without any order or arrangement, and with no roads between, built of trunks of trees, unsquared, and mortised into each other at the corners, the interstices filled with moss and mud, a mode of building warmer than it sounds. In the interior there is always an enormous brick stove, five or six feet high, on which and on the floor the whole family sleep in their rags. The heat and the stench are frightful. No one undresses, washing is unknown, and sheepskin pelisses with the wool inside are not conducive to cleanliness. Wood, however, is becoming very scarce, the forests are used up in fuel for railway engines, for wooden constructions of all kind, and are set fire to wastefully--in many places the peasants are forced to burn dung, weeds, or anything they can pick up--fifty years, it is said, will exhaust the peasant forests, and fresh trees are never planted. The women are more diligent than the men, and the hardest work is often turned over to them, as is generally the case in countries where peasant properties prevail. "They are only the females of the male," and have few womanly qualities. They toil at the same tasks in the field as the men, ride astride like them, often without saddles, and the mortality is excessive among the neglected children, who are carried out into the fields, where the babies lie the whole day with a bough over them and covered with flies, while the poor mother is at work. Eight out of ten children are said to die before ten years old in rural Russia.