Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/138

 100 into the line amidst the cheers of the little village audience.

What struck me most in the social gathering that I have just described was the public spirit of the village community. It was a gathering not of different families but of a whole village, combined as one family, a gathering in which the individuality of each family was submerged. It was a distinctly different type of crowd to what one sees at a fair or flower-show in an English village. No family groups stood aloof, and no pairs of youths and girls went arm in arm apart. The whole village seemed to be living together a life of social intercourse, the like of which I had never quite seen before. It was a condition of society very favourable to the growth of a public opinion, as I show later in dealing with village institutions.

Not long after sundown the youths and girls had all returned to their houses, and quiet reigned in the village. I sat outside the house where I was staying and chatted to some friendly old peasants, who were most inquisitive to know all about me, while I in return tried to get all information I could from them about the country that lay beyond the frontier. "Ah!" they said, "it is a wild country. There is no bread there and only one place, at the house of a certain fur trader, where there is a chance of getting any vodka." "Why!" they added, "bread there costs 2 roubles 50 kopeks sometimes. But there is plenty of gold in the rivers, and some of our brothers have obtained rights to work on some of them, and we will sell you some of these rights." Thereupon a youth pulls out of his pocket a pebble, stained yellow with iron, and exhibits it, fully confident that it is worth 1000 roubles.