On this first night of his incumbency, Ivan Kurbski lodges us with friends. He leaves us for a moment while he enters the yard by the wicket-gate to make due announcement, and the ponies hang their tired frost-covered heads. Your own bows under an equal fatigue. But the wait is very brief. Soon the big double gates of the log-stockaded courtyard open. The horses of their own accord turn in, and swing up to the steps of the house. You are handed out like an invalid grand duke, and are welcomed at the threshold, with a hard hand-shake, by a red-bloused peasant who ushers you up the steps, across the low-eaved portico, and through the square felt-padded door into the big living-room. As we all enter, Ivan and Jacov, caps in hand, bow and make the sign of the cross toward the grouped ikons high up in the corner opposite the door. The saints have guarded you on the way--are not thanks the devoir? Then you, as head of the party, must salute, with a “_Zdravstvouitie_,” your host, the old _Hazan_ father of the peasant who, wearing a gray blouse sprayed with vivid flowers at breast and wrists, sits on a bench beside the window. Now you may sit down beside the massive table on the other bench, which is built along the whole length of the log walls, and survey the curious world into which you have fallen. A woman of middle age, clad in bright red, is busy with a long hoe-like instrument pushing pots into a great square oven six feet high, ten feet to a side, and spotlessly whitewashed. To her right, in the room beside the oven, is a girl of fifteen or sixteen, rolling brown rye-dough on a little table, in perilous proximity to a trap-door leading into some dark nether region. An old bent woman gravitates between the two. Glancing up, one meets the wondering eyes of three sleepy blinking urchins, who peer down in solemn interest from a big cushion-covered shelf, two feet beneath the ceiling. Looking about to locate the muffled sound of crows and clucks, one discovers, beneath the oven, a corral of chickens, pecking with perky bills at the whitewash for lime. On the floor is sitting a little girl crooning some endless refrain to a baby in a sapling-swung cradle. “The _gaspadine_ will take _chai_?” asks the patriarch. From the woman’s room beside the oven the girl brings a samovar. She sets it on the floor, beside an earthenware jar standing near the door, and dips out the water to fill it. Then with tongs she takes a long red ember from a niche cut in the side of the oven, and drops it down the samovar funnel. Round loaves of frozen rye-bread are brought out and set to thaw. A plate of eggs is produced from the cellar. One rolls off as the girl passes, and falls to the floor. Instinctively you start. Not so the others. The egg has dropped like a stone and rolled away. But it is quietly picked up and put to boil with the rest. It is frozen so solidly that there is not even a crack on the shell.