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any one. As Orestes Miller has remarked, the picture is
developed in this direction, so that it assumes huge
proportions. It becomes a poetic representation of the
boundless plain of which the Russian land is made up.
The farmer draws his furrow in this plain with such a
wonderful skill that they only see in him a divine
workman, the representative and protector of Russian
agriculture.
It is only on the morning of the third day that
Volga reaches the countryman who is ploughing up the
ground with the mighty plough, tearing up the roots of
trees and breaking off fragments of rock. He greets
him and congratulates him. Mikula tells him, in
return, how one day, when people from the neighborhood
came to him and demanded taxes, he gave them all taxes
with his staff. When Volga begs him to join his body
guard (Druzhina), Mikula consents on condition that
one of Volga’s men shall pull his plough out of the
furrow and throw it into a bush. But not five, not
even ten, of his brave men can stir the plough from its
place. Then Mikula comes up alone, and with one hand
seizes the plough and flings it up in the clouds, from
which it falls down into a bush.[1]
As we saw, the plough thus fell down from heaven.
Over and over again, as ethnographic studies make
progress, scholars have occasion to admire the scrupulous
trustworthiness of old Herodotus.
To read Ovid after Herodotus is to be transported five
hundred years in time and from one world to another.
But the poetical lamentations of the over-educated
Roman poet and his letters from Pontus are still one
of the oldest sources of our knowledge of how the
regions which to-day lie on the southwestern frontier
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