Here we are peaceful and honest, and we never lock our doors at night, but there, every third person is a thief or a wizard. We go to bed at eight in the evening, and rise at two in the morning, but there they walk the streets and swagger and drink as in a town along the boulevards, up till midnight think of it and don't get up till the sun is in the south. Many pagans and Raskolniki are there, and last year a man came out of the forest and made the people hang themselves a magician. I don't know how it happened, but nobody on this side thinks anything of the Kekhtyites. It is strange how people on the opposite sides of rivers grow at enmity with one another.
Rivers are the sharpest of boundary lines and have been responsible for many wars.
And of course at Kekhtya they said even worse things of the Bobrovites. As the moujiks were keeping open house at Kekhtya, I got a passage over the water in a boat belonging to a family that was going across to visit some relatives. We rose to the height of high waves and then fell with a rush into the undulations between. The water splashed over us. The exciting waves with the big white backs, the children called sheep, bardni, and we counted the little waves in between.