The meals provided were naturally of the simplest foodstuffs--vegetable soups, porridge, and black bread, mostly. Each person received one meal a day, or in some districts one meal in two days. The dishes and spoons were of wood, made by the peasants themselves. The average cost of these meals was from forty-three to forty-five rubles (twenty-one dollars and a half to twenty-two dollars and a half) per one thousand meals--about two or three cents a meal. The young men and women who looked after this work were allowed seven dollars and a half a month! Yet so simple is the life they lead that this was ample to defray all of their necessary expenses. It does not matter what one’s private resources may be, in the midst of such extreme poverty one’s very appetite wanes, and the sin of luxury and extravagance presents itself in a new light. In spite of the deplorable condition of the people living in the twenty-seven famine provinces, and in spite of the marvelously long way a ruble will go in alleviating starvation, of charity in Russia there is little, save among the hungry peasants themselves. The starving are always ready to share their last half pound of bread [Illustration: Famine] with any one else in distress. Nowhere in the world are Maurice Hewlett’s lines truer than in the midst of Russia’s “hungry country”: Only the poor love the poor; Only those who have little Give to those who have less. The less poor gave their mites, and the government distributes the taxes gathered in provinces which are still able to pay, and money borrowed from abroad, that some of the starving population may be supplied with scanty meals. The rich landlords in the midst of these districts seldom contribute anything to relieve the sufferings of their own peasants. Many of them live out of Russia altogether, some, perhaps, because they find the constant distress and unquiet disagreeable. The grand dukes and connections of the reigning house prefer Ostend, Paris, and the Riviera, to Russia; abroad they escape the unpleasant sight of half a nation going hungry. The Emperor is one of the richest men in Europe, yet it is very rarely that he donates anything to charity, so far as is known.