t the same time, all
side-wheelers and clipper-built, drawn hither by the exigencies of the
local trade growing out of the great annual fair. The first of these
steamboats was built in the United States and transported to Russian
waters, since which it has served as a model to builders, who have
furnished many hundreds for river service.

The flat-boats or barges, which have been towed hither by the steamers
from various distances, having been unloaded, are anchored in a shallow
bend of the river, where they cover an area of a mile square. On most of
these barges entire families live, it being their only home; and
wherever freight is to be transported, thither they go; whether it is
towards the Ural Mountains or the Caspian Sea, it is all the same to
them: the Arabs of the desert are not more roving than they.

The Volga has a course of twenty-four hundred, and the Oka of eight
hundred and fifty miles. As the Missouri and the Mississippi rivers have
together made St. Louis in this country, so these two rivers have made
Nijni-Novgorod. This great mart lies at the very centre of the water
communication which joins the Caspian and the Black seas to the Baltic
and the White seas; besides which, it has direct railroad connection
with Moscow, and thence with all Eastern Europe. The Volga and its
tributaries pour into its lap the wealth of the Ural Mountains and that
of the vast region of Siberia and Central Asia. It thus becomes very
apparent why and how this ancient city is the point of business contact
between European industry and Asiatic wealth.

The attraction which draws most travellers so far into the centre of
Russia, lies in the novelty of the great annual fair held here for a
period of about eight weeks, and which gathers together for the time
being some two hundred thousand people, traders and spectators,
merchants and rogues, who come from the most distant provinces and
countries of Asia, as well as from immediate regions round about. The
variety of merchandise brought hither is something to astonish one.
Jewelry of such beauty and fashion as would grace the best stores of
Paris is here offered for sale, beside the cheapest ornaments
manufactured by the bushel-basketful at Birmingham, England. Choice old
silverware is exposed along with iron sauce-pans, tin dippers, and cheap
crockery--variety and incongruity, gold and tinsel, everywhere side by
side. There is an abundance of iron and copper from the Urals, drie