As it turned out I remained ten days. During that time Hughes did everything a perfect and generous host could do, not only in regard to helping me to all of the information I wanted concerning the lives of the workmen, but also to make my visit happy. Late afternoons we would ride out over the rolling steppe, straight away as the crow flies, and come back by the compass when night began to fall. Evenings I was initiated into the intricacies of chess, which I had never before had the boldness to approach. The great industrial section of Russia corresponding to the “black country” of England, is in the provinces of the south, chiefly about Yekaterinoslaff. Here are the deepest coal-pits, the largest factories and forges, the richest iron-mines. Here, across the miles of intervening steppe, between the villages and towns, are always visible the towering stacks of “works.” The nights are made fascinating by the clouds of fire that ever and anon belch starward from the mighty furnaces which melt the ore to fluid, and where are fashioned the rails destined to join East with West and North with South, and the girders which shall span the great rivers. The steppe is a place of vast silence. The widest expanses of the world’s oceans are not lonelier. But where the work and industry of man have possessed the steppes, claimed the earth and all that lies beneath the fields of waving grain, reared structures of stone and metal for the molding and fashioning of civilization’s necessities from these crude riches, silence there is none, neither night nor day. The summer winds which gently bow the corn on the encircling fields are ladened with the sounds of mighty hammer-strokes, grinding wheels, the shrieks of whistles and the labored puffing of the engines. Over the steppe broods the mystic spell of limitless nature. Over the industrial plains, which are the steppe in transition, is the palpable heart-beat of the workaday world. And the men whose labor is the soul of these great industries are themselves like the country, of the past and of the future. Few have permanently left the soil. The men who swelter in the glare and blinding heat of the blast furnaces, who turn the cooling metal in the rolling-mills, pause in their labor and see in the distance a hut of stone and mud with a roof of thatch, and about it a farm--a farm too small and too poor to support them and their families--yet to them home. The Russian workman is an industrian through necessity. Some there are, of course, who have tired of this dual existence and have relinquished the farm land. As time goes on more and more will do this. The “working-class” will cease to be the inert mass it is to-day, and will become a potent factor in the country. But to-day this working-class is largely composed of men who work in the mills and factories while their families work the land, or rent their land, or who hire cheap labor for their land, or who