The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-04-02

has it's special songs, mostly dating from the remotest pre-Christian anti quity
 These songs become especially lively and gay when the best part of the har- vest begins-when the rye, or the wheat after having been left for few days to dry in sheaves. heaped together in shocks. is carted home. Every one is ready then to give lift to the weary horse as it slowly moves along the un- paved country road, and to encourage it with endearing words as it brings home the food of the family.
 In many Families bread may have been wanting, and the last flour parsi- moniously used in expectation of the new crop. Now, at least, few sheaves will be hurriedly thrashed with the fails. and the winnowed again taken to the village windmill in order to hasten the long-expected day when the family may partake of bread baked with new" flour obtained from this years crop.
 For millions of households in Russia that day is much greater festival than any formal festival except, per haps, Easter,-and that fresh baked rye bread, with salt, is the holiest meal of the year. No better reception indeed can be made to a welcome visitor than to offer him new bread and salt. The Ifresh-baked huge loaf, with the wooden salt-box, stand on the table of the izba sor every man, woman or child who lmay enter the house.
 When the months of July and August are dry and hot, the spring sowings be- gin to rioen almost as soon as the rye and wheat harvests are over. The slow l work of harvesting oats, barely, buck l wheat, occasionally some spring wheat, peas and lentils, as also flax and hemp, 1 begins almost immediately after the winter crops are in, leaving no time to rest.
 Every day brings some new work with lit. work which in most cases must be done at once, because in August and in the first half of September the weather often becomes unsettled. Every bright day. sometimes even few hours of sunshine, must be taken advantage of to save this or that crop.
 To-day it is the oats or the harley that must be cut and brought under shelter, otherwise they will be overtaken by the rain and become rotten. To-morrow it
 will be buckwheat which has begun to
 flow" and requires immediate cutting. while the men have perhaps engaged to , work for the next few days on a neighboring landlords estate, and so it is the woman who have to accomplish | J1i bor 1,.-lr Tyl,a may be the flax which is in the same critical condition or the flax that has been rotting in the small ponds has to
 be spread out at once in the fields for
 drying. And then, amid all that work
 there will be, in most cases, some rye or wheat to be thrashed for the sowings in
 the fall. This is mostly done with the fail, or by making horses tread over it
 in circle.
 Moreover, the land will have to be be
 narrowed and sown, while quantities of additional work will have to be done for the neighboring landlords or farmers.
 These last may have rendered in the
 winter some services to the peasants,
 when they were short of money and food. and now they require services to . 1 DS Uc petiu UdCh Uy lHS p6dSdnlS WOrK- ing in their fields. And with all that, the rains which become more frequent,
 continually interrupt the work, which.
 froim being now intermittent, becomes often for that very reason the more in-
 tense. In 1900 in many parts of Russia,
 the binding of the oats, as also the cart
 ing, was entirely done at night, after
 full days work
 Boundless steppes-the Russian name
 for prairies, exactly similar to the Mani toba and Dakota prairies on the Cana
 dian border, and covered with a thick
 layer of extremely fertile black earth spread over southern and southeast
 ern Russia. I have myself seen fields
 where, with the usual rest of the soil
 each third year under fallow, crop had
 after crop had been gathered for eighty
 consecutive years, the crop continuing
 to remain richer than it was elsewhere
 on the best manured clayey soils Up to the end of the eighteenth cen-
 tury this land was either Turkish terri
 tory or in the hands of nomadic hordes
 And it is only within the last thirty years that these fertile tracts began to
 receive a dense populations while far
 ther east, on the high rolling prairies of ,, the southern Urals, or on the high plains spreading at the northern foot of the Caucasus, immense tracts of fertile
 virgin soil were brought under culti- vation and sown with wheat only with
 ln the last quarter of a century. ,l The most mixed population is found E in the steppes. Round the populous Cossack villages (stanitsas) of the Don the Ural the Kuban and the Terek Cos- 1 sacks,-who are all Great Russians z (north Russinans) or Little Russians ; (south Russians or Ukrainians, s,-one , finds the most motley mixture of set , tlers--peasants from the central prov , inces merchants, artisans and espec- tally adventurers of all descriptions,
 who came thither, attracted by the ru- . nor of fortunes which were made some time in wheat-growing.
 1 Few of them own the land, but nearly 2 all of them rent it from the Cossacks, , or from the great land proprietors, who