The working-day begins at six o’clock. It is the practice to begin on an absolutely empty stomach--not even a glass of tea. At half-past-eight there is a half hour for “breakfast,” which usually consists of tea and pirogki--a kind of warm bread with chopped meat in the center, or fish. From nine o’clock till one there is work without intermission, then dinner. The usual dinner is a kind of soup called “stchi” or “borsch.” This is more of a stew than a soup, for it contains chopped cabbage, carrots and other vegetables, and a chunk of boiled meat. The soup is gulped down first, then the meat. Sweets are only included on holidays. This must suffice until six o’clock when the day’s work is done and the workman returns to his hovel--be it farmhouse or lodging--and sits alone with his steaming samovar drinking many glasses of tea, and for solid food meat and potatoes, or fish and potatoes, and black bread. Tea is always taken from a glass, and without milk or lemon. Nor is the workman extravagant as to sweetening his tea by dropping several pieces of sugar into every glass he drinks. Russian sugar is made very hard, and on account of the excise is three times as costly as in neighboring countries. The workman, like the peasant, places one hard lump between his teeth and strains his tea through it. Thus one small lump answers for a glass. The cost of living is not particularly low in Russia, it is the standard of living that is low. An English workman could not live on the same fare as the Russian workman, and an American workman would not even try. The actual prices of food-stuffs and rentals are lower than in England, much lower than in America, but wages are proportionately lower, and the variety of foods in the diet of the Russian workman is much less than of the English or American workman.[21] The wages of a common laborer are seventy-five copecks, or thirty-five cents a day. Men of the type who attend the blast furnaces in the metal works average sixty-five cents a day, while the rollers, who are accounted skilled workmen and are paid by the month, receive one hundred and twenty-five rubles or sixty-three dollars. These, however, are only the very best men. The second men, who make up the majority, receive from twenty-five to thirty dollars monthly. Coal-miners are sometimes paid according to the amount of work they do, and sometimes by the day--as in England and America--but their total income either way, does not amount to more than fifteen or twenty dollars a month. The [Illustration: Interior] [Illustration: Exterior Russian workmen and their “_artel_”] rank and file of laborers do not average above twenty dollars a month. These figures all refer to the best paid industries.