mewhat like what I still remember of St.
Louis after a seventeen years' interval. We travelled from Moscow
over a distance of 273 miles in thirteen hours. For the last hour
or two before we reached our journey's end, we had on our right
the river Oka and a hilly ridge rising all along it and forming
its southern bank.

On alighting at the station we drove through a flat, marshy ground,
intersected by broad canals, to a triangular space between the
Oka and the Volga at their confluence, where the fair is held.

We went through the maze of bazaars and market buildings, of rows
of booths, shops and stalls, eating and drinking sheds, warehouses
and counting-houses. We struggled through long lines of heavy-laden
country carts, and swarms of clattering _droskies_, all striving to
force their way along with that hurry-skurry that adds to confusion
and lessens speed; and we came at last to a long pontoon bridge, over
which we crossed the Oka, and beyond which rises the hill-range or
ravine, on the top and at the foot of which is built the straggling
town of Nijni-Novgorod.

Nijni-Novgorod is a town of 45,000 inhabitants, and, like most
Russian towns, it occupies a space which could accommodate half a
million of people. Like many old Russian towns, also, it is laid
out on the pattern of Moscow, as far as its situation allowed;
and, to keep up the resemblance, it boasts a Kremlin of its own,
a grim, struggling citadel with battlemented walls and mediaeval
towers over its gates, with its scores of Byzantine churches, most
of them with their five cupolas _de rigueur_, clustering together
like a bunch of radishes--one big radish between four little
radishes--but not as liberally covered with gilding as those which
glisten on the top of sacred buildings in St. Petersburg or Moscow;
down the slopes and ravines are woods and gardens, with coffee-houses
and eating-houses, and other places of popular entertainment.

It is a town to be admired on the outside and at a distance as a
picture, but most objectionable as a residence on account of its
marvellous distances and murderous pavement, a stroll on which
reminds you of the martyrdom of those holy pilgrims who, to give
glory to God, walked with dry peas in their shoes.

The pavements are bad in Nijni town, but worse in Nijni fair, for
if in the former all is hard, sharp, uneven flint, in the latter,
what is not wood is mud, and what is not mud is dust, for heavy
showers alternate