Our cooperative store has still quite a stock of goods, and the steadier peasants all belong. We have eighteen hundred members now. Each paid five roubles to buy a share. There were six thousand purchasers last year; and because we charge higher prices to outsiders than to members, so many more peasants wish to join that we are almost ready to announce a second issue of stock.

Of course, our progress has been blocked by the war and the revolution. Goods have gone up to ruinous rates. Already we are nearly out of horseshoes, axes, harrows, ploughs. Last spring we had not ploughs enough to do the needed ploughing, and that is why our crop is short. There is not enough rye in the district to take us through the winter, let alone to feed the towns. And so the town people will starve for awhile - and sooner or later, I suppose, they will finish with their wrangling, start their mills and factories, and turn out the ploughs and tools we need.

While she moved about her kitchen she talked of the high prices. In Petrograd the price of stove wood rose each week; and this, she said, was partly because the peasant boys and women here demanded such big wages for loading the wood onto barges.

"They hardly know what to ask," she laughed. "It is like a game. Every week they keep asking more, and always they get it, and so we go on. And so long as things are in such a state, why should not or people get all they can? Petrograd got all the profits once, and always it was at our expense. Now our turn has come. Why shouldn't we take it."

"Yes, we are living pretty well," she continued quietly, "in spite of the disorders in towns. We have plenty to eat, for we catch our own fish, raise our own chickens, our wheat and rye and vegetables. As for clothes, in almost every hut we have old looms and spinning wheels that we have not used for years - but now all the old grannies are fixing them up. We grew flax in our fields this summer; there are still enough sheep to give us some wool; and so this winter we'll make our own clothes."

Just take a trip to Petrograd. Go to any railroad siding there and you will see perfect hills of scrap iron. Why can't they melt it up again and out it to use? Soon we shall have no axles left, no tyres for our wagon wheels, no chains for the logs, no ploughs for the fields, no horseshoes for our horses! But still they do nothing! The blind fools! The trouble with those people is that they think all the best things are made in the cities. It is not so. Here we grow the flax and grain; here we raise the meat they eat, and the wool to keep them warm; we cut trees to build their houses and firewood to heat their stoves. Thy could not even cook without us! Other country districts turn out the coal and the iron ore. All the real things in Russia are done in the villages. What kind of crops do they raise in the towns? Only Grand Dukes, Bolsheviks and drunkards!

"These Bolsheviks," growled a man with a square head and a short heavy beard already half grey. "Bolsheviks, Bolsheviks - how they shout about being free men. What do they know about being free? They know nothing but books, they sit indoors and scribble and read and talk like clerks - and they are so busy making us free that they have no time to be free themselves! Let them come and find what freedom is! We'll show them!"