whom the former seems chiefly occupied with getting contributions from the peasants, the latter with revolutionary propaganda; both add drinking to their daily work.
In close neighbourhood with these leaders of religion and education, near by in some similar room live the wizards, sorcerers, and hags … they are the survival of primordial paganism. Their traditional school has been preserved, and their prescriptions, having lived through centuries, are handed down from generation to generation.
The sorcerers are generally old people who possess the secret science of curing men and animals of diseases, of appeasing the house demon whenever he gets into too great a fury, of stanching blood, freeing insect-infested houses of vermin, cleaning the vapour baths—standing outside the village—of devils, who chose them as their abode, haunting people; of tracking horse thieves; of invoking the souls of the dead; of foretelling the future; of discovering treasures hidden underground and similar black arts. In reality the wizard or the witch has a good knowledge of botany, and through the dark pages of the history of the Russian village runs a sinister trait of the crimes of poisoning.
I will describe some of the wizard practices from my own experience.
In the province of Petrograd, near the station of Weymarn, there is a village called Manuilov. There some ten years ago lived a man called Sokolov, with
