Our searches in the lower town, Podol, for rugs like those in the monastery resulted in nothing but amusement.  Those rugs had been made in the old days of serfdom, on private estates, and are not to be bought.

By dint of loitering about in the churches, monasteries, catacombs, markets, listening to that Little Russian dialect which is so sweet on the lips of the natives, though it looks so uncouth when one sees their ballads in print, and by gazing out over the ever beautiful river and steppe, I came at last to pardon Kieff for its progress.  I got my historical and mythological bearings.  I felt the spirit of the Epic Songs stealing over me.  I settled in my own mind the site of Fair-Sun Prince Vladimir’s palace of white stone, the scene of great feasts, where he and his mighty heroes quaffed the green wine by the bucketful, and made their great brags, which resulted so tragically or so ludicrously.  I was sure I recognized the church where Diuk Stepanovitch “did not so much pray as gaze about,” and indulged in mental comments upon clothes and manners at the Easter mass, after a fashion which is not yet obsolete.  I imagined that I descried in the blue dusk of the distant steppe Ilya of Murom approaching on his good steed Cloudfall, armed with a damp oak uprooted from Damp Mother Earth, and dragging at his saddle-bow fierce, hissing Nightingale the Robber, with one eye still fixed on Kieff, one on Tchernigoff, after his special and puzzling habit, and whom Little Russian tradition declares was chopped up into poppy seeds, whence spring the sweet-voiced nightingales of the present day.

The “atmosphere” of the cradle of the Epic Songs and of the cradle of Pravoslavnaya Russia laid its spell upon me on those heights, and even the sight of the cobweb suspension bridge in all its modernness did not disturb me, since with it is connected one of the most charming modern traditions, a classic in the language, which only a perfect artist could have planned and executed.

The thermometer stood at 120 degrees Fahrenheit when we took our last look at Kieff, the Holy City.

X.

A JOURNEY ON THE VOLGA.

I.

We had seen the Russian haying on the estate of Count Tolstoy.  We were to be initiated into the remaining processes of the agricultural season in that famous “black earth zone” which has been the granary of Europe from time immemorial, but which is also, alas! periodically the seat of dire famine.

It was July when we reached Nizhni Novgorod, on our way to an estate on the Volga, in this “black earth” grainfield, vast as the whole of France; but the flag of opening would not be run up for some time to come.  The Fair quarter of the town was still in its state of ten months’ hibernation, under padlock and key, and the normal town, effective as it was, with its white Kremlin crowning the turfed and terraced heights, possessed few charms to detain us.  We embarked for Kazan.