told me, actually make houses in these wild places and live there all the year round, coming back to see their friends and relations in the villages occasionally.
I then questioned them as to their past history and who their fathers were, but, as I expected to find, they had no ideas on this point. The village, they said, was eighty years old, and their fathers had come there from some of the neighbouring villages on the steppes. They had trekked toward the forests and made their colony on its edge. Their fathers and grandfathers had lived in those villages before them, and as far as they knew they were Siberians, who had always lived in Siberia. "Then you know nothing of European Russia?" I said. "Most of us have never even been to Krasnoyarsk or seen the Siberian railway," they replied. Here I was, then, among the true Siberians who knew nothing of old Russia, to whom "The Great White Tsar" is a mere name, and whose life is spent among the woodland glades and dark forests of the remoter parts of the Siberian provinces. We kept up our conversation till late in the evening, when I retired to the house of the peasant whose hospitality I was enjoying.
During my stay in this frontier village I made the acquaintance of many other village characters, for although the individual peculiarities of humanity are not perhaps so much developed in a Siberian as in an English village, they nevertheless do exist, as doubtless they do in every rural community throughout the world.
One evening I was sitting on a bench outside a peasant's house, talking with some of the peasants, when I discovered that one of their number, a youth
