The women were both remarkable personalities. They had first met each other in a St. Petersburg prison, where they had both been confined for political offences. One, a woman of twenty-five, large and strong, and fearless, still carried the mark of a Cossack _nagaika_[8] across her forearm, and in one of her shoulders was a Cossack bullet. Her husband at the time of my visit was in prison. She had received an ordinary finishing-school education and begun the study of medicine. During the war she volunteered as a nurse in the Red Cross organization and was sent to Manchuria, but she was returned home for “scattering seeds of sedition” among the army. Pesky we found to be in an even more serious condition than Tsaritzin. The total population was about twenty-one hundred and the number of meals dispensed each day was more than eighteen hundred. In other words, only three hundred souls, or less than seventy-five families, were self-supporting. One who passes through this district well understands how the peasants have come to feel that it is better to chance the bullets and the Cossack nagaika than endure passively the long-drawn sufferings of the life on their inadequate dessiatines. They are almost without hope; and the hopeless are ever fearless. Industry intensified and lengthened to most cruel drudgery has little reward. Severest toil, early and late, and desperately constant while the season lasts, still is not productive of sufficient recompense to supply bread through the months when the fields lie buried under snow-drifts. There was no mistaking the attitude of the peasants toward the young relief-workers, as we walked through the village streets with them. Children ran beside them, or called out to them. Old women addressed the women as “sister.” To the men they were “comrades.”