The daily morning journal and courier., 1906-07-07
RUSSIAN TYPES.
Tragedy and Pathos Found in Tiny
 Village.

NllId6S'
 Cherniyama, the Black Pit; no more accurate description could have been found for my Russian village and the very name (which, mark you IS or no official devising and is not so much as acknowledged in their maps) IS in it. self contradiction of the popular theo- ry of the stupidity of Little Russian peasantry. It lies nothwest of an insig- ni1cant railway station on the line from Wolocyska to schmerinka; a mere dip of the ground in the black drearlness of the plain a desolate relic ot new Scythian attempts at settlement.
 We arrive, df you will come, tool at the wayside station by the very early train from Kieff with intent to visit an English engineer at the sugar mill, 10 miles away. Cherniyama, squalid miserable, is but collection of mud-and-wattle huts, with rare panes of glass in few windows and wattle chimneys half burning away The church is of mud and wattle, like the huts save for the roof and tower, which are shingle covered The vil- lage street is slough of mud in autumn and spring, caked and put rid dung heap in summer, and only in winter is it covered by the garment of white snow, which has done so much in poetry and legend and picture to mask the horrors of Holy Russia.
 Our first call is at the crazy tea house. Over wonder by the table is Bogdan. Presently he will put his pipe to his lips again and blow for us the melancholy minor music which suits so well the endless melancholy of hls life, Bogdon has no story. He has been all his life a slave on the fields, and, his hopes and dreams at theid widest have embraced no more than square patch of ground to call his own and whereon to grow a bit of maize and, perhaps, cabbage It is enough for him that the sun shines in summer and the snow falls in win l ter, and that with his pipe he is well come through all the village which is at once his home and his world.
 Next to him is the Pole His real name is forgotten, but Chort (Old l Nick) they called him when he came 1 first from the frontier, and Chort he will remain. He is the village con- spirator; a little crazy, they say, but the man has no intellect, and a queer, spider-like gift of organization, so that 1t is rather pathetic to find him decaying in this Despond. His story or so much of it as he has ever been willing to tell, is simple and char acteristic.
 He was a membed of sokol, one of those gymnGstic associations which number altogether, some 10000 men banded together for the protection of Polish privileges and the prosecution of the pan-Poland campaign. He and his fellows formed wild and yet mag nfcent schemes for the restoration of Poland from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and he used all his powers in the cause. He organized agendies through out Southe Russia, established revol- utionary press in Lemberg, and, crown l ing achievement of his brief career, actually enlisted into the service an l official in the fortress of Kieff, And all | the while Chort, the brain of the whole system, was to all appearance quiet and harmeless student, living the life of | reoluse in Craeow His last work was to distribute some thousands of manifestoes through the mediuf of Easter eggs. Of course ultimately the trick was discovered, but the mischief was done half the garrison of Kieff had read the dangerous literature and discussed it quietly among themselves
 Then the Russian caught him. They could and did prove nothing against him, but they watched his ev- cry movement, quietly destroyed his correspondence and thwarted his ef- forts; finally they stopped him at the frontier on his way back to Cracow and tore up his passport. Then, be- cause they preferred to keep him, un- der observation, and did not think fit to kill him outright Che was subject of Franz Josef), they allowed him of their elemency to turn back to Cherniyama. He knows he must never leave it; so perhaps there is something in this theory of madness, after all
 And last of the little group in the teahouse is Gregory, the Beggar. He sat by the door of the great cathe- dral in Kieff for years and took such benefit from this, his only birthright, that presently he came to Chernly- anna free for all time of the need to beg. He is emeritus of the mendieant ranks. and, like all other emeriti, he loathes the rest for which he worked.
 Not all the beggars by St. Andrewss steps have such a history. One stands vet as he has stood winter and sum mer at the side of the lowest step His rotten coat is decaping slowly from him, and in winter the death wind touches him now and again to the ouack. His feet are bound in cloths, his hands are crossed upon his breast and his face is turned upward to the cleaning cross above. Tourists cast careless glance at him. The mild yed peasants disregard him. Still that one figure stands motionless in his place, l and in his single person marks the be- ginning of the end of orthodoxy in Rus sia. They call him the unbeliever be- cause. his faith has thrown over the forms of faith, and in one terrible mo- | ment he understood that the temple it. self is but the pedestal of the cross.
 Once a child of his lay sick in Mos COW, and the doctors said there was no help on earth that could save her. One after naother those that he called