FROM THE RAMPARTS OF THE KREMLIN NIJNI-NOVGOROD.
From Nijni to Tsaritzin we have stopped at more than thirty different stations, and no pen could describe the stir and bustle of goods and passengers that awaited us at every wharf and pier.
Several of these stations are towns of 50,000 to 100,000 inhabitants, and, besides their corn trade and tobacco, they all deal in some articles of necessity or luxury, of which they produce enough for their own, if not always for their neighbours', consumption.
Everywhere one sees huge buildings—steam flour-mills, tobacco-factories, salt-mines, soap and candle factories, tanneries—and last, not least, palaces for the sale of koumiss or fermented mare's milk, a sanitary beverage; and extensive establishments, especially near Samara, for the koumiss cure,—fashionable resorts as watering-places, frequented by persons affected by consumption, and other real or imaginary ailments.
There is something appalling in the thought that all this busy, and, on the whole, merry life on the banks of the Volga must come to a dead stand-still for six or seven months in the year. I have been vainly taxing my brain to guess what may become of the captains, mates and crews of the 700 steamers, and of the 5,000 heavy barges with which the river is now swarming; of the porters, agents, clerks, and other officials at the various stations; of the thousands of women employed to carry all the firewood from the piers to the steam-boats. What becomes of all these, and of the men and horses toiling at the steam-row and tow-boats on the Oka, the Kama, the Don, the Dnieper, and a hundred other rivers during the long season in which the vast plains of Russia are turned into a howling wilderness of snow and ice from end to end?
Railway communication and sledge-driving may, by doubling their activity, afford employment to some of the men and beasts who would otherwise be doomed to passive and torpid hybernation. But much of the work that is practicable in other countries almost throughout the year—nearly all that is done in the open air—suffers here grievous interruption.
What should we think in England of a six months' winter, in which the land were as hard as a rock, in which all the cattle had to be kept within doors, in which the bricklayer's trowel and the road-mender's roller had to be laid aside?
And, by way of compensation, what mere human bone and muscle can stand the crushing labour by which the summer months, with their long days of twenty hours' sunlight, must make up for the winter's forced idleness; in a climate too, where, as far as my own experience goes, the heat is hardly less oppressive and stifling than in the level lands of Lombardy or the Emilia?