Some instances are related where the more ambitious men of a Mir have clubbed together to bring in a teacher at their own expense. The Semieski, or “Old Believers,” big, red-bearded, obstinate men, settled in Urluck in the Zabaikal, who dissent from the sixteenth-century revisions of Bishop Nikon, will not send children to Slavonic schools and may have schools of their own. But these cases are rare. There is among the peasantry almost no education and comparatively little desire for it, yet how far this sentiment is from being a racial or national failing the crowds that come to the city universities bear ample witness. In one of the villages a teacher from Chita is established in the side room of a peasant’s house, wherein one night we sojourn. He has been appointed by the Commissioner of Schools of the Cossack Government. He is of a good Nerchinsk family and is brother to an elector of delegates to the second Duma. He is one of the “Intellectuals”--the student class which forms almost a caste by itself. A free-thinker, keenly interested in the rights of man, a Social Democrat by politics, he goes shooting on Sunday with some peasant cronies. He plays Russian airs on his _balilika_ and gets the peasant’s daughter to dance for the guest. He produces specimens of antimony and chalcopyrite, and discusses the geological probability of finding silver or platinum ores in these districts. Photographs of the amateur-kodak variety are along the walls, and on a table in the corner are a mandolin and a pile of books. We pick up a volume,--“L’Évolution de la Moralité,” by Charles Letourneau. The young owner, who consumes a prodigious number of Moscow cigarettes, tells of the indifference to education among the people. “Here we have a school in a big village, with two other communities near by. There are easily five hundred households,--with how many children in each, you can see. Yet we have but thirty boys at school. What can we do?” He is discouraged, this single “Intellectual” of Gotoi. Profoundly solicitous for the future, an idealist, boundless in hopes for the good of his race, he sees the younger generation submerged at the threshold of opportunity by the inertia of the old. “‘What good will it do for him to read?’ ask the peasants, when I urge, ‘Send your boy to the school.’ What can I say? The boy comes from my class after two years, and goes out with the men. He has no money to buy books if he wants them. No newspapers come to the village, no printed matter whatever, save that on the pictures which they buy in the fairs. In a few years all I have taught is forgotten. The darkness is over these villages. One must lift them despite themselves.”