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 river.  The navigation of the Don is much more difficult than that of the Volga.  The river is extremely shallow, and the sand-banks are continually shifting, so that many times in the course of the day the steamer runs aground.  Sometimes she is got off by simply reversing the engines, but not unfrequently she sticks so fast that the engines have to be assisted.  This is effected in a curious way.  The captain always gives a number of stalwart Cossacks a free passage on condition that they will give him the assistance he requires; and as soon as the ship sticks fast he orders them to jump overboard with a stout hawser and haul her off!  The task is not a pleasant one, especially as the poor fellows cannot afterwards change their clothes; but the order is always obeyed with alacrity and without grumbling.  Cossacks, it would seem, have no personal acquaintance with colds and rheumatism.