up in August to a dismal brown, and so dry that a dustcloud raised by the least wind is perpetually hanging over the town, just as smoke-clouds do over Sheffield. or Manchester. Like most towns in Russia, it has absolutely nothing in the way of a sight, not even a provincial museum or an old church; everything is modern, common-place, and uninteresting, and life itself, one would think, must partake of the same character. The only thing to remember it by, besides its splendid situation, looking out over the Volga and the great steppe, was the more than usually large proportion of Germans among the people, a lucky thing for the traveller asking his way, and one which gave to many of the houses an appearance of snug neatness distinctly Teutonic; for though your Slav is sometimes magnificent, he is rarely comfortable. All this part of Russia, down the river as far as Tzaritsyn, is full of German colonies, planted by Catherine II. in the hope that they would teach cleanliness, neatness, and comfort, and, above all, good methods of agriculture, to their Russian neighbours-a hope which has not been realized, for they have remained for the most part quite distinct, living in their own villages, not intermarrying with the Muscovites, often remaining ignorant of their language. By far the most prosperous of these colonies belong to the Mennonite or Moravian persuasions, who thrive as the Quaker colonists throve in America. But now one hears that they are mostly leaving Russia altogether, fearing the enforcement of the new law of universal conscription. To them, who hold war a

sin, service in the army would be a serious matter; and they appeal to the promise Catherine made that they should never be so required to violate their conscientious scruples. The government is perplexed: it does not wish to break faith, but, like all governments, it hates making exceptions, especially invidious exceptions in favour of people who do not hold the national faith.

At Saratof we took the railway which carried us with only two changes of carriage all the way to the foot of the Caucasus, a journey of 1100 miles, which occupied from Sunday afternoon to Wednesday afternoon. We had intended to descend the Volga as far as Tzaritsyn, cross over to the Don at Kalatch, and descend the Don by steamer; but finding that there was only one, or at most two steamers a week on the Don, that the steamer would probably have started from Kalatch just before we arrived there, that the duration of her voyage could not even be guessed at, since most of the time was spent in getting her off the sandbanks on which she was constantly grounding, and finally that the only way of escaping the voracious crowds of mosquitoes was to fling oneself into the river, which, however, was too shallow to afford the relief of drowning, we abandoned this idea, and preferred even the fatigue of seventy continuous hours in a railway car. Fortunately that fatigue turned out a great deal less than we had expected. In no country, except America, is railway travelling so easy, I might almost say enjoyable, as in Russia, if only you are not in a

hurry to get over the ground. The cars have a passage down the middle, and a little platform at each end where you may stand when the dust is not too distressing. The seats, even in the second class, are wide, low, and comfortable, and they can be pulled out in such a way as to form an excellent couch, where one can sleep soundly all night long. In the first class there are luxurious couches, both for night and day. The pace never exceeds, and seldom reaches, twenty miles an hour, so that one is not much shaken, and can read without injury to the eyes. Excellent refreshment-rooms are provided at intervals of three or four hours, at all of which the passengers dismount and take a hearty meal, washed down by vodka or by countless glasses of lemon-flavoured tea, weak no doubt, but of a flavour such as one never gets in an English hotel. One has ample time, not only to eat at these stations, but to get out and walk up and down at most of the others. Except upon such lines as that from St. Petersburg to Moscow, or Moscow to Nijni Novgorod, the number of passengers is not so great as to crowd the carriage, and you can generally find somebody who talks French or German (most probably a German himself), and is pleased at the opportunity of airing his knowledge. Partly from these facilities for moving about, partly from the interest of seeing a new bit of country, we stepped out of the train after three nights and three days less tired than one usually is by a journey from London to Edinburgh.

The scenery of this vast region, which the Don and

its tributaries drain, is intensely monotonous, so monotonous that its uniformity almost rises to grandeur. From Saratof the railway climbs the slope of the hills that border the Volga, whose bed is here little above the ocean (the Caspian being, as everybody knows, some eighty feet below the Black Sea), and comes out on a wide slightly rolling upland, not wholly unlike the country round Newmarket, only that it is more bare of wood. Then it passes through a land most of which is cultivated, and which is, indeed, of extraordinary fertility, for here we are in the famous black soil region, but where scarcely a sign of human life is visible. The villages are few, and a solitary farmhouse is almost unheard of; the Russian peasant is gregarious, and apparently does not mind having to walk a good many miles to his work. The fields are not divided, or rather there are no fields at all, but one vast open space, in which the different crops run in long parallel patches, corn and buckwheat predominating. The greenness of Northern Russia is utterly. gone everything is dry, bare, dusty; a stream seldom appears, and when it does, is muddy and sluggish. The houses of the peasantry, which further north towards the forest country are always of wood, are here mostly of clay, strengthened possibly by a few bricks or wattles. They are wretched enough, yet not so much worse than those of our agricultural labourers on backward estates. Sometimes one sees on the skirts of a village a pretty large farm standing not without evidences of wealth, but there is mostly an untidy look about it-haystacks tumbling over, fences

ill-kept, nothing trim or finished. The bucolic Russian has no gift for neatness, any more than his urban brother has for comfort.

As the line runs farther west, past Tambof, famous for its horses, Kozlof,' a junction for a line from the north, and Griazi, a still greater junction, where the train from Moscow to the Caucasus joins us, the country grows flatter and also somewhat better wooded. Between Griazi and Voronej, the next considerable place, one runs through an unbroken forest of beech for eight or ten miles, a forest, however, as is mostly the case in Russia, whose trees do not exceed twentyfive or thirty feet in height, and which has therefore nothing of forest gloom or forest grandeur about it; it is only land covered with trees. After Voronej, a handsome-looking town which runs along the steep westerly bank of the Don-here, too, as on the Volga, the right bank is the steep one-the woods finally disappear, and one enters the true steppe, that strange, solitary, dreary region, whose few features it is so easy to describe in words, but the general impression of which I do not know how to convey. Our train traversed it during an entire afternoon, night, and day, from Voronej to Rostof, at the mouth of the Don, so

1

1 A propos of Kozlof, a story is told in Russia to illustrate the domi nance of the Germans, and the supposed dislike to them of the present heir to the throne, which is as follows. At a review a great number of officers were being presented to the Czarevitch. One after another comes forward bearing a German name, till at length the name of a certain Lieutenant Kozlof is called out. 66 "At last a Russian," cried the heir to the throne. "Lieutenant Kozlof, I wish you success in your career."

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