r-built, drawn hither by the
exigencies of the local trade contingent upon the period of the great
annual fair. The first of these steamers was built in the United
States and transported at great trouble and expense to these Russian
waters, and has served as the model of the hundreds now employed on
the river. The flat-boats which the steamers had towed from various
distant points, having been unloaded, were anchored in a shallow bend
of the river, where they covered an area fully a mile square. On many
of these boats entire families lived, it being their only home; and
wherever freight was to be transported thither they went: whether it
was towards the Ural Mountains or the Caspian Sea, it was all the
same to them.

The Volga has a course of over twenty-four hundred, and the Oka of
eight hundred and fifty miles. As the Missouri and Mississippi rivers
have together made St. Louis, so these Russian rivers have made
Nijni. This great mart lies at the very centre of the water
communication which joins the Caspian and the Black seas to the
Baltic and White seas, besides which it has direct railroad
connection with Moscow and thence with the entire east of Europe. The
Volga and its tributaries pour into its lap the wealth of the Ural
Mountains and that of the vast region of Siberia and Central Asia. It
thus becomes very apparent why and how this ancient city of
Nijni-Novgorod is the point of business contact between European
industry and Asiatic wealth.

The attraction which draws the traveller so far into the centre of
European Russia, lies in the novelty of the great annual fair held at
Nijni for a period of about eight weeks, and which gathers for the
time being some two hundred thousand people,--traders and
spectators,--who come from the most distant provinces and countries,
as well as from the region round about. A smaller and briefer fair is
held upon the ice of the rivers Volga and Oka in January, but is
comparatively of little account; it is called a horse-fair, being
chiefly devoted to trade in that animal. The merchandise accumulated
and offered for sale at the grand fair in August and September is
gathered principally from the two richest quarters of the globe. It
is of limitless variety, and in quality varying from the finest to
the coarsest. As an example of this, jewelry was observed of such
texture and fashion as would have graced a store on the Rue de la
Paix, offered for sale close beside the cheapest orn