None of these masters more than touched the Russian merchants, that homespun moneyed class, crude and coarse, grasping and mean, without the idealism of their educated neighbors in the cities or the homely charm of the peasants from whom they themselves sprang, yet gifted with a rough force and determination not often found among the cultivated aristocracy.

The benches were crowded with that jetsam and flotsam of humanity that New York's mighty sewers throw in armies upon her inland beaches at every sunrise: Here a sodden brute sleeping off a prolonged debauch, there a lad whose frankness of face and homespun clothes and bewildered eyes spelt, "from the farm and mother's watchful love."

Dimitri was dressed in a home-spun braided jacket and homespun Turkish trousers, shaped like baggy riding-breeches, and his complete impenetrability to new ideas was only equalled by the solemnity and touching willingness with which he received them.