"Just like their mean tricks," mutters Smoothbore savagely. "First the game won't show at all, and then they come so thick that no fellow would be such a cad as to fire at 'em."
Night comes on, and the foul-creeping mist begins to steam up from the low banks of greasy black mud, driving us perforce into the cabin, where we speedily fall asleep on the benches along the walls—for bed-places there are none. About midnight I begin to dream that I am a Christian martyr in the reign of Diocletian, "in the act" (as Paddy would, say) of being burned alive; and I awake to find it all but true. The fact is, the steward, with a thoroughly Russian love of overheating, has put wood enough into the stove to roast an ox; and there is nothing for it but to bolt on deck again, where we remain for the rest of the night.
The panorama of the deck in the early morning forms an ethnological study hard to match, except perchance by the Yokohama packet steaming out of 'Frisco, or a "coolie boat" coming over from Demerara to Trinidad. Gaunt, aquiline Cossacks, and portly Germans, and bumfaced Tartars; red-capped, broad-visaged, phlegmatic Turks; slim, graceful Circassians, beautiful with all the sleek tiger-like beauty of their gladiator race; sallow, beetle-browed Russians, and black-robed, dark-eyed, melancholy Jews. We have one Persian on board—a lanky, hatchet-faced rogue, half buried under a huge black sheepskin cap not unlike a tarred beehive. He smokes one half the day and sleeps the other half, and is only once betrayed into any show of emotion. This occurs at one of our halting places on the second day, when he comes on board again grinning and whooping like a madman, having succeeded (as I learn when his excitement subsides) in cheating a Cossack out of a halfpenny.
But the appearance of the Russian mujiks (peasants), and the manner in which they curl themselves up anywhere and anyhow, and sleep the sleep of the just with their heads in baskets and their feet in pools of dirty water, baffles all description. A painter would revel in the third-class deck about sunrise, when the miscellaneous hash of heads and limbs begins to animate itself, like a coil of snakes at the approach of spring—when mothers of families look anxiously about for the little waddling bundles of clothes that are already thrusting their round faces and beady black eyes into every place where they ought not to go; and when brawny peasants, taking their neighbor's elbow out of their mouth, and their knee out of their neighbor's stomach, make three or four rapid dips, like a drinking duck, to any village church that may be in sight, and then fall to with unfailing zest to the huge black loaf which seems to be their only baggage. The whole thing is like a scene in a fairy tale:
There was an old captain that lived in a "screw." He had so many passengers he didn't know what to do; They'd got nary baggage but one loaf of bread. They squatted round the funnel, and that was their bed.
As we move southward, our surroundings alter very perceptibly. A genial warmth and a rich summer blue replace the cold gray sky of the north; the banks begin to rise higher, and to clothe themselves with thick patches of bush, and even trees, instead of the coarse prairie grass; while at every halting place the little wooden jetty is heaped with perfect mounds of splendid grapes, sold at three cents per pound, by men in shirtsleeves—phenomena which, to us who are fresh from the furred wrappings and snow-blocked streets of Moscow, have a rather bewildering effect. But the most striking sight is (to our friend Allfact at least) the huge masses of coal which now fuel the steamer instead of the split logs of the Volga.
"You see Russia's richer than her neighbors think," remark I. "On the Don alone there are 16,000 square miles of the finest anthracite, which leaves only two per cent. of ashes in burning."
"Sixteen thousand square miles!" cries the statistician, whipping out his note-book. "Why on earth doesn't she use it, then, instead of destroying all that valuable timber?"
"Well, you see, the railways are not completed yet; but when they are I can promise you that Russia will cut out England altogether in supplying Constantinople and the Levant."
One by one the little villages slip by us: Alexandrosk, the first sign of which is the glitter of its gilded church-tower; Nikolaievo, with its black marble monument to the late Crown Prince; Konstantirovskoë, the birthplace of Prince Potemkin, brightest and most worthless of Russian favorites, who "lived like an emperor and died like a dog." They are all vary much of one pattern: substantial log-cabins, curiously painted, with little palisaded gardens in front, and red-shirted men sitting smoking at their doors, alternating with little wickerwork hovels daubed with mud, which look very much like hampers left behind by a monster picnic. Gangs of lean dogs (the pest of every Cossack village) are sniffing hungrily about, while scores of sturdy wenches, with berry-brown arms and feet, and sunburnt children clothed only in short pinafores lined with dirt, run to stare at the wonderful fire-breathing vessel as she comes gliding in.