Page:The Boy Travellers in the Russian Empire.djvu/180

174 very much in the air, but facial ornaments of the kind described for the famous regiment are not strictly the fashion.

"Fred thinks a regiment composed in this way ought to be good soldiers, as they would be able to smell the smoke of battle a long way off, and before other regiments would be aware of it. Certainly they ought to breathe easily, and this ability was considered of great importance by the first Napoleon. 'Other things being equal,' he used to say, 'I always

choose an officer with a large nose. His respiration is more free than that of the small-nosed man; and with good breathing powers, his mind is clearer and his physical endurance greater.' Perhaps he realized on his retreat from Moscow that many of his pursuers were of the kind he describes.

"We have been much interested in the mujiks, or peasants—the lowest class of the population, and also the largest. Their condition has improved greatly in the last twenty or thirty years, if what we read and