A POLISH VILLAGE IN THE MOUNTAINS
It was a Jewish trader who advised me to visit Jedlovka. He said that I would see the peasants living there now as they had lived for hundreds of years—in the simplest and most primitive fashion.
Jedlovka, I found, is a little straggling village in the foothills of the Carpathians—the mountains which divide Galicia from Hungary. In order to reach the village it was necessary to take the train at Cracow and ride for an hour or more in the direction of Lemberg, which is the Ruthenian, just as Cracow is the Polish, metropolis of Galicia.
At a place called Turnow we changed cars and continued our journey in a direction at right angles to that in which we previously travelled. It was another hour's ride by train to the foothills of the mountain. At Tuchow, at the point where the railway, running southward, plunges into the mountain, we disembarked again and continued our journey by wagon. The road led up out of the broad plain
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 through which we had been travelling, into a narrow and sombre little valley. At the end of this valley there is a little wayside inn. Higher up, where the road, winding up out of the valley, leads out into a high, clear space at what seemed to be the top of the mountain, there is a church, and this tavern and the church, together with a few scattering log huts, were the village of Jedlovka and the end of our journey.
I had had a vague sort of notion that somewhere in this remote region I should meet peasants wearing sheepskin jackets, sandals, and leggings bound with thongs, driving their herds to pasture. I even had a wild hope that I should come upon some rustic festival, such as I had read about, where the young men and women would dance upon the greensward, to the music of shepherds' pipes. As a matter of fact, it chanced that our visit did fall upon a feast day, but there were no shepherds and no dances. What I saw was a crowd of women pouring out of the little church, high upon the hill, and crowds of drunken men carousing at the tavern below.
Before I proceed to tell what I learned of the peasant life in this mountain country, however, I want to refer to one feature of Polish life which was impressed upon me by what I saw on the way.
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I have referred in the preceding chapter to the position which the Jew occupies in the economic organization of Polish life. He is the middleman and has the trade of the country very largely in his hands. I was particularly impressed with this fact by what I saw in the course of this journey. Although the Jews represent only about 13 per cent. of the population of Galicia, I am certain that more than half of the people on the train on which we travelled were people of that race. There were Jews of all descriptions and in all stages of evolution, from the poor, patient pedler, wearing the garb of the Ghetto, to the wealthy banker or merchant fastidiously dressed in the latest European fashion. When we left the train at Tuchow it was a Jewish horse trader who drove us in his improvised coach the remainder of our journey into the mountains. A restaurant at which we stopped to get something to eat on our return was conducted by a Jew. Halfway to our destination we passed a tumbledown cottage, close to the roadside, with a few trinkets in the window and some skins hanging from the beam which ran along the front of the building. We stopped and spoke to an ancient man with a long white beard, who lives there. He, also, was a Jewish trader. As I recall, he was engaged in buying skins from the peasants,
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 paying them in the junk which I noticed displayed in the window. When we reached the tavern at the end of our journey it turned out that the man who ran the tavern was a Jew. Apparently wherever in Poland money changes hands a Jew is always there to take charge of it. In fact, it seemed to me that the Jew in Poland was almost like the money he handled, a sort of medium of exchange.
It was a very curious conveyance in which we made the last stage of our journey into the mountains. Instead of the droske we had expected to meet at the station we found what, under ordinary circumstances, would have been a farmer's wagon, I suppose, although it was an altogether different sort of farmer's wagon from any I had ever seen in America. The frame of this vehicle was something like a great long basket, narrow at the bottom, where it sat upon the axles, and wider at the top. The rim of this basket was made of poles, about the size of a fence rail, and this rim was supported upon the frame, which rested on the wagon, by little poles or pickets fastened in the frame below and the rim above, like a fence paling. The frame was so formed that it might have served the purpose either of a hayrick or a carryall. In this case it had been converted into a sort of coach or omnibus, with hanging seats, supported with
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 leather straps from the rim. Arranged in this way this farmer's wagon was a not inconvenient mode of travel, and, driving through the fresh green country, dotted with quaint, little moss-covered cottages which seemed as much a part of the landscape as if they had grown there, the journey was made very pleasantly.
The houses in this part of the country were, for the most part, smaller, more weather-worn and decrepit, than those I had seen in other parts of Galicia. In fact, in some cases the green-thatched roofs were so old, so overgrown with vegetation, and the little whitewashed frames of the buildings that supported them had so sunken into the soil, that some of them looked like gigantic toadstools. As the day we visited this part of the country was a holiday, we met along the way many of the peasants, dressed in the quaint and picturesque garb of the country, passing in groups of two or three along the road.
I had before this visited a number of the peasant houses and was familiar with the plan and arrangement of them. The interior of these houses is usually divided into two rooms, separated in most cases by an entrance or hallway. In one of these rooms the whole family, consisting of the parents and perhaps five or six children, live, eat, and sleep. In this room there
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 is usually a very large brick or stone oven which, on the cold winter nights, I learned, frequently serves the purpose of a bed. In the other room are the cows, pigs, geese, chickens. If the farmer is well-to-do he will have a number of buildings arranged in a hollow square having a goose pond in the centre and, in that case, the servants will very likely sleep in the straw in the barns with the cattle. I can give a more vivid notion of some of these houses by quoting a few lines from the notes jotted down by Doctor Park at the time of our visit:
To-day, for the first time, we visited some of the peasant houses in a little village about three or four miles from Cracow. It was difficult at first to make friends with the people. After a time it transpired that they were afraid that, although we were evidently foreigners, we might be Government officials of some sort. This is, perhaps, not strange, since there are many races in this country and most of them are "foreigners" to each other. Our guide says the people fear the country will be some day handed over to Russia. We got on better when the people learned we were Americans.
Every window of the little cottages we passed was crowded with laughing, curious children, with pink faces and white teeth. We visited the home of a widow with ten "yokes" of land and two cows. The cows give fifteen litres of milk a day, which is about ten quarts. The woman carries this to the market in Cracow every day. In the narrow little kitchen the children were all lined up in a row against the wall as we entered. O............