January 19, 1992

The little boy is very naughty, so he does not get a Popsicle. He can have one, with his friends, if he says he is sorry. "The Popsicle sat in the freezer for six months," said the mother, Mary-Jean Messier. "Then we threw it out."

EVEN with a jail as a neighbor, residents of rural Brooklyn often left their cars unlocked and took walks at any hour of the night, recalled First Selectman Donald S. Francis. But people in the eastern Connecticut town have changed their behavior in the past year, he said, now that the old 85-bed "country jail" has grown into a prison for 500 inmates. These days people lock their cars "and look inside their cars before they get in them," he said. "They live with a little more caution." Since 1988 the state has been building and expanding prisons to keep up with an increase in the number of convicted criminals. And the escape of two felons on New Year's Eve from the state's maximum-security lockup in Somers has heightened concern about prison security around the state.

Dominick Masullo allows his 13-year-old son to go by himself to the store, about a block from their home in the northeast Bronx -- but not without specific instructions about what to do if a stranger approaches or he senses some other danger. "He knows how to look around and how to run," Mr. Masullo said. "If there's a big problem, you run into a store and call a parent. If the storekeeper tells you to leave, you hug the cash register. What's the thing the storekeeper cares most about? His money. You don't touch the money. But he's going to call the police, and they're going to come, which is what you want."

A WOMAN, A MAN, AND TWO KINGDOMS The Story of Madame d'Epinay and the Abbe Galiani. By Francis Steegmuller. Illustrated. 280 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $23.

The line to buy a piece of the action in the People's Oil Industrial Investment Euro-Asian Corporation, with its unlikely sales office in an empty hall of the Museum of the History of Moscow, is a good measure of Russians' growing panic about the vanishing value of the ruble. "Here we are taking a risk, of course," said Nikolai Khanchenkov, a 41-year-old scientific researcher, as he stood on the museum's drafty stairwell recently. He was waiting his turn to plunk down 1,000 rubles, roughly $10 at the current exchange rate, for a share in the brand-new company. "On the other hand, if we hold on to our money, we will certainly lose it," he said. "It is that simple." Snow Stays, Money Goes With inflation running at an estimated annual rate of 300 percent, Russians are at a loss to know what to do with their savings. Some money is being siphoned off to pay for the recent big jump in food prices, but with faith in the future at a low point, many people now prefer to eat less and put their rubles into something more durable.