on the ultimate decision.  The natural consequence is that the railway-map of Russia presents to the eye of the strategist much that is quite unintelligible to the ordinary observer—­a fact that will become apparent even to the uninitiated as soon as a war breaks out in Eastern Europe.  Russia is no longer what she was in the days of the Crimean War, when troops and stores had to be conveyed hundreds of miles by the most primitive means of transport.  At that time she had only 750 miles of railway; now she has over 36,000 miles, and every year new lines are constructed.

The water-communication has likewise in recent years been greatly improved.  On the principal rivers there are now good steamers.  Unfortunately, the climate puts serious obstructions in the way of navigation.  For nearly half of the year the rivers are covered with ice, and during a great part of the open season navigation is difficult.  When the ice and snow melt the rivers overflow their banks and lay a great part of the low-lying country under water, so that many villages can only be approached in boats; but very soon the flood subsides, and the water falls so rapidly that by midsummer the larger steamers have great difficulty in picking their way among the sandbanks.  The Neva alone—­that queen of northern rivers—­has at all times a plentiful supply of water.

Besides the Neva, the rivers commonly visited by the tourist are the Volga and the Don, which form part of what may be called the Russian grand tour.  Englishmen who wish to see something more than St. Petersburg and Moscow generally go by rail to Nizhni-Novgorod, where they visit the great fair, and then get on board one of the Volga steamers.  For those who have mastered the important fact that Russia is not a country of fine scenery, the voyage down the river is pleasant enough.  The left bank is as flat as the banks of the Rhine below Cologne, but the right bank is high, occasionally well wooded, and not devoid of a certain tame picturesqueness.  Early on the second day the steamer reaches Kazan, once the capital of an independent Tartar khanate, and still containing a considerable Tartar population.  Several metchets (as the Mahometan houses of prayer are here termed), with their diminutive minarets in the lower part of the town, show that Islamism still survives, though the khanate was annexed to Muscovy more than three centuries ago; but the town, as a whole, has a European rather than an Asiatic character.  If any one visits it in the hope of getting “a glimpse of the East,” he will be grievously disappointed, unless, indeed, he happens to be one of those imaginative tourists who always discover what they wish to see.  And yet it must be admitted that, of all the towns on the route, Kazan is the most interesting.  Though not Oriental, it has a peculiar character of its own, whilst all the others—­Simbirsk, Samara, Saratof—­are as uninteresting as Russian provincial towns commonly are.  The full force and solemnity of that expression will be explained in the sequel.