Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/163

Rh "I and my brothers have it together," he answered. "And how many pounds of corn can you grow here?" He stopped and lit his pipe. "This land is new," he said, "and sometimes gives 200 pounds on the desyatin, but we have some old land over there and that only gives 100 pounds; if the frost comes in the autumn it gives less. That old land has given us our bread for many summers past. It must have rest now. So I work on this land, which has not been touched before and is still young." "Do you ever use the manure of your horses or cattle?" I asked. "Not needed," he said. "We throw that outside the village, and the snow-water in spring carries it away. We have no trouble except the autumn frost, which often kills our wheat and makes our rye give less, and how can manure help us?"

This was a homely lesson in agriculture, which I had not thought of in quite the same light before. After all, there was sense in what the old man said. The boundless extent of virgin soil on the edge of this forest zone is such that he need not worry about those rules of husbandry which we consider indispensable in Western Europe. These peasants, therefore, treat their land superficially, and when one plot is exhausted move to another.

I could not help thinking how much better off these peasants were than their kinsmen in European Russia. There the land is limited and the population large, but here a little colony of Siberian peasants have a tract of land nearly as big as an English county, most of which could be roughly cultivated if the forest and scrub were cleared.

The old man now stopped his horse, and we sat down to smoke our pipes on the edge of a little