“See how I live! They’re taking my last sheep, and I myself and these brats are barely alive!” She points up at the bunks and the oven-top, where her children are. “Come down! … Now then, don’t be frightened! … There now, how’s one to keep oneself and them naked brats?”
The brats, almost literally naked, with nothing on but tattered shirts—not even any trousers—climb down from the oven and surround their mother.
The same day I go to the District Office, to make inquiries about this way of exacting taxation, which is new to me.
The District Elder is not in. He will be back soon. In the Office several persons are standing behind the grating, also waiting to see him.
I ask them who they are, and what they have come about. Two of them have come to get passports, in order to be able to go out to work at a distance. They have brought money to pay for the passports. Another has come to get a copy of the District Court’s decision rejecting his petition that the homestead—where he has lived and worked for twenty-three years, and which has belonged to his uncle, who adopted him—now that his uncle and aunt are dead, should not be taken from him by his uncle’s granddaughter. She, being the direct heiress, and taking advantage of the law of the 9th November, is selling the freehold of the land and homestead on which the petitioner lived. His petition has been rejected, but he cannot believe that this is the law, and wants to appeal to some higher court—though he does not know what court. I explain that there is such a law, and this provokes disapproval, amounting to perplexity and incredulity, among all those who are present.
Hardly have I finished talking with this man, when a tall peasant with a stern, severe face asks me for an explanation of his affairs. The business he has come about is this: he and his fellow villagers have, from time immemorial, been getting iron ore from their land; and now a decree has