with stifling heat; and, after a three hours'
drought one would say that these good people, who live half in
and half out of a swamp, and who drink anything rather than water,
can never spare a poor drop to slake the pulverized clay of their
much trodden thoroughfares.

With all these drawbacks, however, and even with the addition of
its villainous smells, this is an interesting and striking spot.
No place can boast of a more sublime view than one can get here
from the Imperial Palace and Terrace, or from the church-domes
or spires on the Kremlin; or, even better, from the Esplanade of
Mouravief's Folly--a tower erected by the well-known General of
that name on the highest and foremost ravine, and on the summit of
which he had planned to place a fac-simile of the famous Strassburg
clock, but constructed on so gigantic a scale that hours and minutes,
the moon's phases, the planets' cycles and all besides, should be
distinctly visible from every locality of the town and fair for
miles and miles around.

From any of those vantage-grounds on the hill look down. The town
is at your feet; the fair--a city, a Babylon of shops--stretches
beyond the bridge; the plain, a boundless ocean of green, field and
forest, dotted here and there with church-spires and factory-shafts
at prodigious distances; and the two broad rivers, bearing the
tribute of remote regions from north and south in numberless boats
and lighters, and neat gallant steamers; the two streams meeting
here at right angles just below the pontoon-bridge where an immense
five-domed church of recent construction has been reared to mark
and hallow the spot.

Down at the fair, in the centre of its hubbub, rises the governor's
summer-place. The governor dwells there with his family during the
few weeks of the fair (mid-August to mid-September), coming down
hither from the Imperial Palace in the town Kremlin, and occupying
the upper floor. The whole basement, the entrance-hall, and all
passages--with the exception of a narrow, private, winding
staircase--are invaded by the crowd and converted into a bazaar,
the noisiest in the fair, where there is incessant life and movement,
and music and hurly-burly at every hour between noon and night--a
lively scene upon which his Excellency and his guests and friends
look down from the balcony after their five o'clock dinner, smoking
their cigarettes, and watching the policemen as they pounce like
trained hawks on the unwary pick-p