and I stepped to the ground, that I might gain a better focus. As I looked into the finder, a piercing shriek from one of the girls startled me, and looking up I saw the entire group start madly down the road. Whether they mistook my camera for an infernal machine, I do not know, but their alarm was genuine. Some young Cossacks who were standing near laughed boisterously and pursued the girls and brought them back. When they had been made to understand what it all meant, they were highly pleased, and they stood round in all kinds of groups to be photographed. When I secured as many pictures as I wanted we continued across the square, and passed two high, heavy, wooden doors that barred the entrance of a yard. This was the home of my guide. A comely buxom girl of about seventeen, with red cheeks and eyes as blue as my guide’s, threw open the great doors, and we drove into a confusion of sledges and carts, broken hayricks, horses, cattle, pigs, and dogs. A more untidy yard I never saw. Cows and pigs adjusted themselves according to inclination. Mud, filth, straw, littered the whole place. The yard was a small enclosure. A paling ten feet high on the side where we entered. On the right a house of stone and mud, whitewashed, with a thatched roof, an ornamented ridge pole and elaborate gables. A singular place to look upon. On the left a similar house. Immediately ahead, opposite the entrance, a crude shed with simple plank and railing stalls for horses and cattle. Two strong housewifely women stood on the porch of the house in the light, watching our entrance. Their sleeves were rolled up above the elbows, and their arms were folded--heavy, muscular arms, developed by constant toil. They greeted us kindly, even warmly, and bade us enter. Within I started in veritable surprise. The little kitchen with its Russian oven and sleeping box above for the young and the aged in one corner, a home-fashioned bed in another, was as clean as a drawing-room. Scrubbed, dusted, polished. The big brass samovar on the table shone like a door plate. Three icons were secured to the wall in one corner, next to the ceiling. Before them the perpetual light was burning, the oil cup suspended from a nail driven into the ceiling. After the filth and mud of everything in the yard, and the village, the cleanliness of the three simple rooms which made up the house was marvelous. They were models of household industry.