pocket and a savage dog at his heels.
For the first week or two after their arrival, the foresters
and other permanent officials keep guard at night over the houses
they are put into. I suppose they find it sleepy work;
for certain it is that spring after spring the same thing happens,
fifty of them getting away in spite of all our precautions,
and we are left with our mouths open and much out of pocket.
This spring, by some mistake, they arrived without their bundles,
which had gone astray on the road, and, as they travel in their
best clothes, they refused utterly to work until their luggage came.
Nearly a week was lost waiting, to the despair of all in authority.

Nor will any persuasions induce them to do anything on Saints'
days, and there surely never was a church so full of them as the
Russian Church. In the spring, when every hour is of vital importance,
the work is constantly being interrupted by them, and the workers
lie sleeping in the sun the whole day, agreeably conscious that they
are pleasing themselves and the Church at one and the same time--
a state of perfection as rare as it is desirable. Reason unaided
by Faith is of course exasperated at this waste of precious time,
and I confess that during the first mild days after the long
winter frost when it is possible to begin to work the ground,
I have sympathised with the gloom of the Man of Wrath, confronted in
one week by two or three empty days on which no man will labour,
and have listened in silence to his remarks about distant Russian saints.

I suppose it was my own superfluous amount of civilisation
that made me pity these people when first I came to live among them.
They herd together like animals and do the work of animals;
but in spite of the armed overseer, the dirt and the rags,