manner, and his imperious gestures with his large, handsome, sunburnt hands, on one of which for sole ornament was an old-fashioned wedding-ring.
CHAPTER XXVII
"If it only were n't a pity to abandon what has been done,—cost so much labor,—it would be better to give up, sell out, go abroad, and hear 'La Belle Hélène,' like Nikolaï Ivanovitch," the old proprietor was saying, while his intelligent face lighted up with a pleasant smile.
"There now! but still you don't sell out," said Nikolaï Ivanovitch Sviazhsky; "so you must be well off, on the whole."
"I am well off in one way, because I have a home of my own, with board and lodging. Besides, one always hopes that the peasantry will improve. But would you believe it,—this drunkenness, this laziness! Everything goes to destruction. No horses, no cows. They starve to death. But try to help them,—take them for farm-hands: they manage to ruin you; yes, even before a justice of the peace!" [1]
"But you, too, can complain to the justice of the peace," said Sviazhsky.
"What! I complain? Not for the world! All such talk shows that complaints are idle. Here, at the mill, they took their handsel, and went off. What did the justice of the peace do? Acquitted them. Your only chance is to go to the communal court,—to the starshina. The starshina will have the man thrashed for you. He settles things in the old-fashioned way. If it were not for him you had better sell out, fly to the ends of the world!"
- ↑ In the Russian mir, or commune, the starshina, or elder, is the chief elected every three years. Before the emancipation of the serfs, in 1861, each commune had its volostnoï sud, or district court, the decisions of which were often very ridiculous. Among the reforms instituted by the Emperor Alexander II. was the so-called mirovoïsudya, justice or arbiter of the peace,—more properly, judge of the peace,—an innovation which at first caused much opposition among the peasantry. See Wallace's "Russia" and Leroy Beaulieu's "L'Empire des Tsars."—Ed.
