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Something for drink, please! I gave him something; he drank himself drunk, and that day danced the 'fish dance' so that the serf-girls and peasant-women positively shrieked with delight he surpassed himself in his antics so wonderfully. Next day I went home, and three months later, in Petersburg, I heard that Ivan had kept his word.
Platonic unions between the self-mutilators and the Siberian peasant-women were fairly frequent, so deeply-rooted in the heart of man does the desire for a common life appear to be. The skoptzi loved money for money's sake, and were considered the enemies of the working-classes.
We have already seen the debased condition to which field-work, apparently, has reduced the peasant-women of continental Europe: we have seen that they resemble animals as much as they do women, so heavy and unremitting is the toil with which they are burdened.
Dignified merchants in white muslin, whose grooms held white mules saddled with rose-coloured velvet, warriors from the Atlas wearing the corkscrew ringlets which are a sign of military prowess, Jewish traders in black gabardines, leather-gaitered peasant-women with chickens and cheese, and beggars rolling their blind eyes or exposing their fly-plastered sores, were gathered in Oriental promiscuity about the great man's door; while under the archway stood a group of youths and warlike-looking older men who were evidently of his own clan.
Not a word was said by any of them during the short passage from the jetty of Guerande to the extreme end of the port of Croisic, the point where the boats discharge the salt, which the peasant-women then bear away on their heads in huge earthen jars after the fashion of caryatides. These women go barefooted with very short petticoats.
Many peasant-women of Normandy and Bretagne sell their beautiful brown, red, or golden locks, but these are of such fine quality that they command very high prices. Norman or Breton girls having braids eighty centimetres in length sell them for as much as a thousand francs. Perfectly white hair from the same French provinces brings a sum which seems almost fabulous.
The ignorant peasant-women starve the children, and the people stagnate in darkness, and are helpless in the hands of every village clerk, while you have at your disposal a means of helping them, and don't help them because to your mind it's of no importance."
Around her neck she ties a small plain kerchief of white muslin, and, as it is not allowed her to mount the scaffold with uncovered head, she puts on it the round linen hood which the peasant-women used to wear. Black stockings cover her feet, and over them she draws shoes of black woollen stuff. Her toilet is now ended earthly things have passed away!
The town was one vast bazaar. The peasant-women from the country, with their gold and silver tiaras and the year's rent of a comfortable farm in their earrings and necklaces, and the sturdy Frisian peasants, many of whom had borne their matchlocks in the great wars which had lasted through their own and their fathers' lifetime, trudged through the city, enjoying the blessings of peace.
In the sepulchral incense-laden dusk of the uncouth Church, in the religious gloom punctuated by the pervasive twinkle of a thousand hanging lamps of silver, was wedged and blent a suffocating mass of palm-bearing humanity of all nations and races, the sumptuously clothed and the ragged, the hale and the unsightly; the rainbow colors of the East relieved by the white of the shrouded females, toned down by the sombre shabbiness of the Russian moujiks and peasant-women, and pierced by a vivid circular line of red fezzes on the unbared, unreverential heads of the Turkish regiment keeping order among the jostling jealousies of Christendom, whose rival churches swarm around the strange, glittering, candle-illumined Rotunda that covers the tomb of Christ.
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