As the impatient audience begins to pound and stamp, a bell rings, and the curtain rises on two comic characters busily engaged in packing for a hurried departure from their lodging. The stage has become a room, with red-cotton-covered walls and bright green curtains. A merchant comes with a bill for comestibles six months due. He is quieted with extravagant tales of forthcoming change for a hundred-thousand-rouble note. The landlady enters, and the shoemaker’s apprentice with a pair of mended boots. Both are likewise cajoled and bullied away. The Jewish money-lender is more difficult, but at length, to the manifest delight of the audience, he, too, is staved off, and the pair draw the vivid green curtains and go out through a window for parts unknown, amid much glee and applause. We now go out to the “buffet” and contribute to the dangers of conflagration by smoking an offered cigarette. We also add to the theatre’s income by buying a glass of hot _chai_ for ten kopecks. Something special is in the air for the next act. The audience is buzzing and moving in eager expectancy. We return to our seats. The curtain rises upon a double row of two-_pud_ (sixty-four-pound) weights, such as are used at the bazaar to sell frozen beef. Amid a thunder of stampings on the plank floor one of the escaping debtors of the last act, dressed in tights, comes out from behind the green curtains, and lifts one of these above his head. Then he poises one with each hand. Finally a wooden harness is adjusted to his body, and sixteen weights (or about half a ton), are heaped upon him by the jack-booted Buriat stage-attendant on one side, and the defrauded merchant of the first play on the other. It is the most unspectacular performance possible, this athletic test, but it takes the place of a football match in Siberia. The applause is ferociously appreciative. More _chai_ and cigarettes, and we come back to hear a very pretty girl, dressed in the peasant’s costume of Little Russia, head a chorus, and to see a boy in red blouse and boots dance the wild dervish whirl which the peasants of tradition are supposed to execute. The boy is in the midst of his performance when there is a tumult among the forty-kopeckers under the musicians’ eyrie. The latter, being human, try to watch what is going on below and play jig-music at the same time, and sharps and flats fly wide of the mark till the sounds become frightful. Everybody jumps up on his bench to see a peasant having a turn with a Buriat, and further trouble brewing with a Cossack who has got upset in the mêlée. There is a chaos of tossing hats and brandished fists, and the two armed soldiers who are on guard as policemen press in, with gruff shouts to make them way. The tumult finally goes out the door and into the street, and we turn back to the poor dancer still trying to beat out his stunt.