When I arrived at my destination I found the country looking intensely green after a wet summer; the weather was boiling hot and the nights had the softness and the sweetness that should belong to the month of June. SKETCHES IN CENTRAL AND SOUTH RUSSIA I THE RELIGION OF RUSSIAN PEASANTS The contrast which strikes the traveller who travels directly from Central to Little Russia (which is in the South) is not unlike that of which a traveller would be aware if he went straight from Cambridgeshire or Norfolk to South Devon or Normandy. The season in both places is doing the same thing. The vegetation in the one place is not startingly behindhand or ahead of the vegetation in the other place; autumn in both places has reached the same stage; only in each place it has reached that stage in a different manner. In Central Russia there is a bite in the morning air, a smell of smoke, of damp leaves, of moist brown earth, and a haze hangs before the tattered trees, which are generously splashed with crimson and gold. In Little Russia the pageant of decay is just as far advanced; but little green remains in the yellow and golden woods; everything is hot and dry; there is no sharpness in the air and no moistness in the earth; summer instead of being conquered by the invading cold seems to be dying like a decadent Roman emperor of excess of splendour and softness and opulence. The contrast in the habitations of man is sharper still. In Central Russia the peasant’s house is built of logs and roofed with straw or iron according to the means of the inhabitant. The villages are monotonously and uniformly brown, colourless, and sullen; in the South the houses are white or pale green; these are surrounded with orchards and fruit trees; they often possess the luxury of glass verandahs; there is something well-to-do and smiling about them, something which recalls the whitewashed, straw-thatched cottages of South Devon, or the farms in Normandy, and all the delicious things which the French language conveys and suggests better than any other, since it is lighter; for in a few words, such as-- “Dans le jardin de mon père Les lilas ont fleuri.” It conjures up endless vistas of joyousness, gaiety, and sunshine. When people generalise about the intense misery of the Russian peasants, the squalor in which they live, they should remember that Russia is a large country; that it possesses a north, a south, an east, and a west, and that what is true about one place is quite untrue about another. So that in one village the peasants may be starving for want of bread, and a hundred miles to the north or south you may find a village where the peasants have spent 300,000 roubles (£30,000) in building an enormous church, which is the case in the village of Lamki, government of Tambov, and there the church stands, towering and immense, built entirely by the voluntary contributions of peasants, to witness if I lie.