The peasants one day sent us a young bear; he was not full-grown, but he was so enraged at being made captive that he gnawed his paws to pieces, and they were obliged to kill him. It is no uncommon thing to see young wolf-cubs offered for sale even in St. Petersburg itself, but I do not know to what use they are put. In the most northern parts, in which lynxes and ermines, squirrels and sables are found, the hunters go into the forests for weeks at a time. They are provided with a little sledge, which they draw after them, containing the necessary provisions, and which they fill with skins as the stock of provisions diminishes. I was told that their quickness of sight is wonderful, and that they can discern at an immense distance the little black tip of the ermine’s tail on the wide plains of snow that it traverses. Whoever has travelled in Russia cannot fail to have admired the great skill of the peasantry in using their axes: it is no exaggeration to say that a common boor can build and furnish his house with the help of that instrument alone. Nothing can be more interesting than to watch a number of these poor people engaged in constructing their dwellings, and very much goodwill is also to be remarked among them in assisting each other. All who have ever seen them must have felt the greatest admiration and even respect for the serfs, who, with all their faults, are really good-hearted, and possessed of natural talents which it is a shame and a sin in the government to stifle or render useless by keeping them in ignorance; but until slavery disappears from the land, and they are taught the proper use of freedom, it is nonsense to hope that great men will rise from the people. There was a poor man in Twer, a slave belonging to M. M——ff, a land-proprietor, who was possessed of a genius for painting that in any other country would have acquired for him both fame and fortune. Better for him had he been born an idiot! To him his talents were a dire misfortune, for his master, on learning his love for drawing and his great natural gifts, perceived at once that some handsome profit, by the way of _abrock_, might be realized for himself in cultivating them. Accordingly he placed him with an ordinary portrait-painter, where he was forced to learn a branch of the art which, although the most likely to serve his owner’s views, was most distasteful to himself, as he had genius for better things. He had no sooner served his time than the amount of poll-tax was yearly demanded: as everybody does not have a likeness taken, especially in a provincial town, it was no small difficulty to pay it. When we last saw him he had pined into a decline, and doubtless ere this the village grave has closed over his griefs and sorrows, and buried his genius in the shades of its eternal oblivion.