Memoirs of Peter Jansen; The Record of a Busy Life an Autobiography (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: water is kept boiling by burning charcoal. Tea in glasses is served on every occasion and at all times of the day, and six to twelve tumblerfuls are not at all out of the way for one person to consume during one sitting. Sliced lemon is served with the tea and lump sugar taken into the mouth and kept until melted. On my last trip to Russia, in 1900, I had two American friends with me, and stepping into one of the largest banks in Moscow at about ten A. M. we found all the clerks, cashiers, tellers, etc., with glasses of tea by their sides on their desks, and in order to convince my friends that this was a regular custom I asked the manager for an explanation. He took us into a back room, where a huge samovar stood on a table, from which a special attendant was serving tea and biscuits (suchary) twice a day. The manager was very hospitable and insisted upon our partaking of the tea. MY BOYHOOD DAYS As stated ibefore, my father set about repairing the damage done to his buildings by the ravages of war and neglect and reestablishing 'his grain business. He formed a partnership with Abraham Matthies, who had a store (lawka) in the nearest Mennonite village, called "Rudner- weide." Matthies' part was to buy up the wheat and other grain from the farmers, who by this time raised great crops of it, load it into rwagons, and send it to the seaport Berdjansk, where it would be stored in warehouses of my father's, awaiting export, mostly to England. I believe it may be interesting to describe the way in which this grain was grown, harvested and transported. The plowing and harvesting of the land was done very much as it is now, only that the plows were of wood, with the exception of the plowshare. The mouldboard even was wooden and had tobe constantly scraped with a little ...