RUSSIAN WANDERERS.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXIX, Issue 107, 27 June 1911, Page 3

RUSSIAN WANDERERS.

Thd Russians, imlk'kij/hvn to themselves, have still muc/f'pf the nomad in' thh'nf. Where is q cduntry vast as thehVy'ith so few local dialects? Dcsnite the inland passport system which has striven to fix the people to tl! °, fjh W'ns. .tpwtew.Ms li.mpucu ovhr severe winters,' nmnhahit.iblo tracts, marshes and immense rivers.’ Poor men often leave their homos ppd, families oil, a pilgrimage to somOjamynnt shrine iQffqctly as do the Arabs', and so great is their love of wandering that, like a rolling stone once started, -they TOtrfrr “across country from one shrine to another, forgotfjsM§: their old hftOahd are often found dead by the roadside. Whole villages migrate about those endless steppes. For rich ape} poor alike, travelling is an end iri itself; th6y hate a!P occupations that tie them down to a particular spot; landed proprietors easily transfer their affections’ from one place ,to another, buying and selling estates in different corners of the land; they will think nothing of going from, SR, Petersburg to Odessa on the pfetext of purchasing a hat or a pair of gloves. Railway stations resemble gipsy encampments ; second-class hotels, littered with the travellers’ cooking apparatus, pillows, towels, samavors, and all the heterogeneous impediments of nomadism, are ’ simple caravunseries. Houses look as if they were not intended to be permanently occupied; nothing has been or ever will he long in its place; tho clocks are not going, the doors ape not shut—an instinctive rccollccton of a breezy tent life; there is a surprising lack of furniture, especially of the kind which the Anglo-Saxon requires for storing away clothes and “settling , down.” Russians never settle down.—From “Intellectual’ Nomadism.” by,'. Norman Douglas, in the“ North American RovicW.” .a...., ,