The contents of the bar itself consisted of rows of little bottles of different coloured liquors, interspersed with packages of cigarettes, all of them made and sold under the supervision of the Government. I purchased one of these little bottles of vodka, as it is called, because I wanted to see what it was the Government gave the peasants to drink. It was a white, colourless liquid, which looked like raw alcohol and was, in fact, as I afterward learned, largely, if not wholly, what the chemists call "methylated spirits," or wood alcohol. We visited one of the little peasant houses in the neighbourhood of the customs office. It was a little, low log hut with a duck pond in front of the doorway and a cow-pen at right angles to the house. There were two rooms, a bedroom and a kitchen. In the kitchen, which had an earthen floor, three or four or five members of the family were sitting on stools, gathered about a large bowl, into which each was dipping his or her spoon. The bedroom was a neat little room, containing a high bed, a highly decorated chest of drawers, and was filled with curious bits of the rustic art, including among other things several religious pictures and images. Although everything in this house was very simple and primitive, there was about it an air of self-respecting thrift and neatness that showed that the family which lived here was relatively prosperous and well-to-do. Quite as interesting to me as the houses we visited were the stories that our guide told us about the people that lived in them. I recall among others the story of the young widow who served in the customs office as a clerk and lived in a single room in one corner of the peasant's cottage to which I have just referred. She was a woman, he told me, of the higher classes, as her enterprising manner and intelligent face seemed to indicate; one of the lesser nobility, who had married a Russian official condemned for some fault or other to serve at this obscure post. He had died here, leaving a child with the rickets, and no means. Another time our guide pointed out to us a more imposing building than the others we had seen, though it was built in the same rustic style as the smaller peasants' cottages around it. This house, it seems, had at one time belonged to one of the nobility, but it was now owned by a peasant. This peasant, as I understood, had at one time been a serf and served as a hostler in a wealthy family. From this family he had inherited, as a reward for his long and faithful service, a considerable sum of money, with which he had purchased this place and set himself up, in a small way, as a landlord.