The purchasers of the farm implements and the horses and cattle were the remnants of the old Asiatic nomad tribes, who, through long centuries, roamed over the lands where Europe and Asia merge. Generations ago Samara was important as one of Russia’s eastern frontier posts. At this point the Asiatic invaders--the Tartars, the Bashkirs, the Kirghiz, the Kalmucks--were beaten back into the mysterious unknown lands which at intervals through centuries seemed veritably to vomit them forth. They came, not as armies are advanced in ranks and regiments, but in hordes, helter skelter, human beings in droves. Now all these swarthy peoples are nominally conquered and the spirit of conquest is dead in them. They are content to live pastoral lives and eke out a living as they may. They are nearly all “dark” people, as illiterates are called in Russia. But they somehow manage to fare better than the Russian peasants. They suffer no irksome regulations. Their wandering life makes it easy for them to escape the burdens that the government would lay upon them, and so it comes that they are able to profit by the dire distress of the peasants. For a song they purchase what the peasant has sweated blood to acquire. The Tartars, especially, are ready purchasers of horses, for horsemeat is their common diet. In the village of Tolkai, for example, I witnessed a sale of peasants’ horses to Tartars that was memorable. Colts were sold for forty cents. A horse still able to work could be bought for five dollars. Horses showing signs of starvation went for two dollars and a half and three dollars. Two rather dilapidated horses went for four dollars and a quarter the pair. Having sold their horses, their cattle, their implements; having pulled the thatch from the roofs of their outhouses and homes; having burned even their own houses for fuel;--all of these things having been acquired through years of toil, how many years must lapse before these peasants will regain the status of free and independent men! “Where there is famine, sickness takes root and flourishes. Typhus, scurvy, and fouler diseases ravage starving villages, making yet more hideous the plight of the suffering people. The drinking water goes bad and becomes a great disease-spreading medium. Even smallpox sometimes attains the proportions of an epidemic. In house after house I visited were the frail little bodies of children faded to mere skin-coated skeletons upon whom the hand of death already rested. And save for the men and women who volunteer for service in the relief kitchens, and who may be medical students, or nurses, there is oftentimes no medical aid whatever for the sick and the dying. One phase of hunger which I had not seen before was the swelling of the limbs before death, presenting an abnormally healthy appearance.