ds and
especially bright-coloured cotton handkerchiefs. He himself is enveloped
in a capacious greasy khalat, or dressing-gown, and wears a fur cap,
though the thermometer may be at 90 degrees in the shade. The roguish
twinkle in his small piercing eyes contrasts strongly with the sombre,
stolid expression of the Finnish peasants sitting near him. He has much
to relate about St. Petersburg, Moscow, and perhaps Astrakhan; but, like
a genuine trader, he is very reticent regarding the mysteries of his own
craft. Towards sunset he retires with his companions to some quiet spot
on the deck to recite evening prayers. Here all the good Mahometans on
board assemble and stroke their beards, kneel on their little strips
of carpet and prostrate themselves, all keeping time as if they
were performing some new kind of drill under the eve of a severe
drill-sergeant.

If the voyage is made about the end of September, when the traders are
returning home from the fair at Nizhni-Novgorod, the ethnologist will
have a still better opportunity of study. He will then find not only
representatives of the Finnish and Tartar races, but also Armenians,
Circassians, Persians, Bokhariots, and other Orientals--a motley and
picturesque but decidedly unsavoury cargo.

However great the ethnographical variety on board may be, the traveller
will probably find that four days on the Volga are quite enough for all
practical and aesthetic purposes, and instead of going on to Astrakhan
he will quit the steamer at Tsaritsin. Here he will find a railway of
about fifty miles in length, connecting the Volga and the Don. I say
advisedly a railway, and not a train, because trains on this line are
not very frequent. When I first visited the locality, thirty years ago,
there were only two a week, so that if you inadvertently missed one
train you had to wait about three days for the next. Prudent, nervous
people preferred travelling by the road, for on the railway the strange
jolts and mysterious creakings were very alarming. On the other hand the
pace was so slow that running off the rails would have been merely an
amusing episode, and even a collision could scarcely have been attended
with serious consequences. Happily things are improving, even in this
outlying part of the country. Now there is one train daily, and it goes
at a less funereal pace.

From Kalatch, at the Don end of the line, a steamer starts for Rostoff,
which is situated near the mouth of the r