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Passing five homesteads, and turning off to the right, we drop down into a hollow and drive along a dyke, the farther side of a small pond; behind the round tops of the lilacs and apple-trees a wooden roof, once red, with two chimneys, comes into sight; the coachman keeps along the hedge to the left, and to the spasmodic and drowsy baying of three pug dogs he drives through the wide open gates, whisks smartly round the broad courtyard past the stable and the barn, gallantly salutes the old housekeeper, who is stepping sideways over the high lintel in the open doorway of the storehouse, and pulls up at last before the steps of a dark house with light windows.... We are at Tatyana Borissovna's.
They come here for gain, not for pleasure; for high wages, not for the comforts that cluster about home. Here are poor widows toiling to educate their children; daughters hoarding their wages to redeem mortgaged paternal homesteads or to defray the expenses of sick and infirm parents; young betrothed girls, about to add their savings to those of their country lovers.
And they see, on the other hand, those colored men who refused to volunteer as soldiers, and who have found more honest paymasters than the United States Government, now exulting in well-filled pockets, and able to buy the little homesteads the soldiers need, and to turn the soldiers' families into the streets. Is this a school for self-sacrificing patriotism?
A million immigrants came from impoverished Europe in the four succeeding years, begging for freedom and a place to live. These millions too were given bonuses of grants of land, and soon the uninhabited West was dotted with primitive homesteads and scattered ranches that must be served. Food, in all its varieties, is a primal necessity.
It had about a score of houses and homesteads, with shutters of bright green or sky blue, and roofs rose red or black and white, and walls whitewashed until they shone in the sun like snow. In the centre of the village stood a windmill, placed on a little moss-grown slope; it was a landmark to all the level country round.
There had been Balkan rumblings, which, it hardly seemed possible, could echo in these distant hills, but speedily the shadow on Europe darkened, and they rode out to the cross-road to get the mail as soon as the coach arrived. And then, through the long spun-out wire which connected many scattered homesteads with the outer world, came the great news War with Germany.
But in India the occasional redistribution of lots survives only in a few localities, and as a mere tradition in others; the arable mark has become private property, as well as the homesteads. In Russia, on the other hand, re-allotments occur at irregular intervals averaging something like fifteen years.
But when she came to the destination she sought a small, rather shabby cottage standing a mile or so westward from the middle of things communal, out in the fringes of the village where outlying homesteads tailed away into avowed farmsteads the house itself was closed up fast and tight.
Russell recorded his surprise at finding that the Louisiana planters made no reckoning whatever of the cost of their slaves' labor, that Irish gangs nevertheless did the ditching, and that the slave children of from nine to eleven years were at play, "exempted from that cruel fate which befalls poor children of their age in the mining and manufacturing districts of England"; and then upon glimpsing the homesteads of some Creole small proprietors, he wrote: "It is among these men that, at times, slavery assumes its harshest aspect, and that slaves are exposed to the severest labor."
Her villas and homesteads flamed or smoked; her orchards flared heavenward in a torrent of sparks or stood black sapless trunks charred to their inmost pith; the promise of her harvests lay as grey ashes over the land. But her ramparts, though breached in places, were yet manned by her sons, and their assailants recoiled pierced by the shafts or stunned by the catapults of the defence.
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