About three o’clock in the afternoon of the second day from Kazan, the yemshick pointed out the spires of Nijne Novgorod, on the southern bank of the Volga.  A fleet of steamers, barges, and soudnas lay sealed in the ice along the shore, waiting for the moving of the waters.  The road to the north bank was marked with pine boughs, that fringed the moving line of sleighs and sledges.  We threaded our way among the stationary vessels, and at length came before the town.  A friend had commended me to the Hotel de la Poste, and I ordered the yemshick to drive there.  With an eye to his pocket the fellow carried me to an establishment of the same name on the other side of the Oka.  I had a suspicion that I was being swindled, but as they blandly informed me that no other hotel with that title existed, I alighted and ordered my baggage up.

This was the end of my sleigh ride.  I had passed two hundred and nine stations, with as many changes of horses and drivers.  Nearly seven hundred horses had been attached to my sleigh, and had drawn me over a road of greatly varied character.  Out of forty days from Irkutsk, I spent sixteen at the cities and towns on the way.  I slept twenty-six nights in my sleigh with the thermometer varying from thirty-five degrees above zero to forty-five below, and encountered four severe storms and a variety of smaller ones.  Including the detour to Barnaool, my sleigh ride was about thirty-six hundred miles long.  From Stratensk by way of Kiachta to Irkutsk, I traveled not far from fourteen hundred miles with wheeled vehicles, and made ninety-three changes.  My whole ride from steam navigation on the Amoor to the railway at Nijne Novgorod was very nearly five thousand miles.

There was a manifest desire to swindle me at the bogus Hotel de la Poste.  Half a dozen attendants carried my baggage to my room, and each demanded a reward.  When I gave the yemshick his “na vodka,” an officious attendant suggested that the gentleman should be very liberal at the end of his ride.  I asked for a bath, and they ordered a sleigh to take me to a bathing establishment several squares away.  My proposition to be content for the present with a wash basin was pronounced impossible, until I finished the argument with my left boot.  The waiter finally became affectionate, and when I ordered supper he suggested comforts not on the bill of fare.  The landlord proposed to purchase my sleigh and superfluous furs, and we concluded a bargain at less than a twelfth of their cost.

After a night’s rest I recrossed the Oka and drove to the town.  Here I found the veritable Hotel de la Poste, to which I immediately changed my quarters.  The house overlooked a little park enclosing a pond, where a hundred or more persons were skating.  The park was well shaded, and must be quite pleasant in summer.  The town hardly deserves the name of Nijne (Lower) Novgorod, as it stands on a bluff nearly two hundred feet above the river.