between the two great
cities chanced to run through its borders. It contains a little over
thirty thousand inhabitants; has its Kremlin, cathedral, theatre,
library, and public parks. An English-speaking Russian, evidently a
man of business and affairs who was bound for Moscow, gave us a very
good idea of Tver. Its locality upon the river makes it the recipient
of great stores of grain, wool, and hemp for distribution among
western manufacturers. Wood-cutting and rafting also engage a large
number of the population, the product in the shape of dimension
lumber, deals, etc. finally being shipped to western European ports.
Our informant also spoke of this being the centre of an intelligent
community scarcely exceeded by the best society of St. Petersburg.
From this point the river is navigable for over two thousand miles to
far off Astrakhan. In a country so extensive, and which possesses so
small a portion of seaboard, rivers have a great importance; and
until the introduction of the growing system of railroads, they
formed nearly the only available means of transportation. The canals,
rivers, and lakes are no longer navigated by barges propelled by
horse-power. Steam-tugs and small passenger steamboats now tow great
numbers of flat-bottomed boats, which are universally of large
capacity. Freight by this mode of conveyance is very cheap; we were
told at Nijni Novgorod that goods could be transported to that great
business centre from the Ural Mountains, a distance of nearly
fourteen hundred miles by river, for twenty-five shillings per ton.
The Volga is the largest river in Europe; measured through all its
windings, it has a length of twenty-four hundred miles from its rise
among the Valdai Hills, five hundred and fifty feet above the
sea-level, to its _debouchure_ into the Caspian. Many cities and
thriving towns are picturesquely situated mostly on its right bank,
where available sites upon elevated ground have been found,--as in
the case of Kostroma, and also at Nijni-Novgorod, where it is joined
by the Oka. In addition to these rivers there are also the Obi, the
Yenisei, the Lena, the Don, and the Dnieper, all rivers of the first
class, whose entire course from source to mouth is within Russian
territory, saying nothing of the several large rivers tributary to
these. We must not forget, however, those frontier rivers, the
Danube, the Amoor, and the Oxus, all of which are auxiliary to the
great system of canals that co