One day I climbed into a huge metal basket and was lowered twenty-five hundred feet toward the earth’s heart. The walls of the shaft were of splendid firm masonry, great blocks of stone like granite. The engines which controlled the descent were equipped with the most modern patents for haulage, automatic brakes and indicators. At another mine I gingerly placed one leg in a small wooden affair like a nail keg, grasped a hemp rope from which the keg was suspended with one hand, and was swung out over a dark well, called a shaft, and with the other hand and the other leg (the one _outside_ the keg) maintained an unsteady balance, and saved myself from too violent contact with the sides, as two horses jogged round a ring, unwinding a drum allowing the keg and its load to go jerkily bottomward. Here the shaft sides were of timber--crude, wooden slats interlaced after the fashion of a crib. The former was the result of the English influence; the latter was pure Russian. Between the Russian miner and the French, Belgian, or British miner is this difference: the Russian has not the blood of coal-miners in his veins, nor the traditions of underground workers handed down to him from preceding generations. Whereas the others are generally miners by tradition and breeding, the Russian is really a peasant driven from his land to seek a living where he can find it. Mining is a casual choice with him, he would as lief be in the rolling-mill, or tending one of the coke-ovens. This system of labor which permits workmen to spend part of the year on their farms and part in the mines and mills, is a symptom of Russia’s industrial revolution. The workers who do this are called “the go-aways,” and make up a large percentage of the workmen in the industrial districts of south Russia, with the result that they are poor agriculturists and second-rate workers. Slowly the system will pass, and industrial towns composed of a permanent population be established. The Russian peasant has been on the land so long that he has little ambition to leave it. When the land is worked out, exhausted, and the annual harvest is no longer sufficient to keep the souls and bodies of his family together, he goes off to the towns. The vast area of European Russia given solely to agriculture, makes it often necessary for the peasant to travel far to find winter employment. Thus north Russians have a journey of fifteen hundred, or two thousand miles to the south Russian mines and factories. This is a goodly distance for a peasant. When harvest-time comes year after year, the worker more and more shrinks from going back to his patch of land to reap the meager harvest, and each year some give up the thought and remain at their work. Many more, however, have a bred-in-the-bone love for the soil, and with a political revolution in the atmosphere, with a general cry from one end of the empire to the other of “Land--Land,” they come up out of the