The Sowers by Henry Seton Merriman — Read

The village of Osterno, lying, or rather scrambling, along the banks of the river Oster, is at no time an exhilarating spot. It is a large village, numbering over nine hundred souls, as the board affixed to its first house testifieth in incomprehensible Russian figures.

A "soul," be it known, is a different object in the land of the Czars to that vague protoplasm about which our young persons think such mighty thoughts, our old men write such famous big books. A soul is namely a man -- in Russia the women have not yet begun to seek their rights and lose their privileges. A man is therefore a "soul" in Russia, and as such enjoys the doubtful privilege of contributing to the land-tax and to every other tax. In compensation for the first-named impost he is apportioned his share of the common land of the village, and by the cultivation of this ekes out an existence which would be valueless if he were a teetotaller. It is melancholy to have to record this fact in the pages of a respectable volume like the present; but facts -- as the orator who deals in fiction is ever ready to announce -- facts cannot be ignored. And any man who has lived in Russia, has dabbled in Russian humanity, and noted the singular unattractiveness of Russian life -- any such man can scarcely deny the fact that if one deprives the muzhik of his privilege of getting gloriously and frequently intoxicated, one takes away from that muzhik the one happiness of his existence.