last to pardon Kieff for its progress. I got my
historical and mythological bearings. I felt the spirit of the Epic
Songs stealing over me. I settled in my own mind the site of Fair-Sun
Prince Vladimir's palace of white stone, the scene of great feasts,
where he and his mighty heroes quaffed the green wine by the bucketful,
and made their great brags, which resulted so tragically or so
ludicrously. I was sure I recognized the church where Diuk Stepanovitch
"did not so much pray as gaze about," and indulged in mental comments
upon clothes and manners at the Easter mass, after a fashion which is
not yet obsolete. I imagined that I descried in the blue dusk of the
distant steppe Ilya of Murom approaching on his good steed Cloudfall,
armed with a damp oak uprooted from Damp Mother Earth, and dragging at
his saddle-bow fierce, hissing Nightingale the Robber, with one eye
still fixed on Kieff, one on Tchernigoff, after his special and puzzling
habit, and whom Little Russian tradition declares was chopped up into
poppy seeds, whence spring the sweet-voiced nightingales of the present
day.

The "atmosphere" of the cradle of the Epic Songs and of the cradle of
Pravoslavnaya Russia laid its spell upon me on those heights, and even
the sight of the cobweb suspension bridge in all its modernness did not
disturb me, since with it is connected one of the most charming modern
traditions, a classic in the language, which only a perfect artist could
have planned and executed.

The thermometer stood at 120 degrees Fahrenheit when we took our last
look at Kieff, the Holy City.

X.

A JOURNEY ON THE VOLGA.

I.

We had seen the Russian haying on the estate of Count Tolstoy. We were
to be initiated into the remaining processes of the agricultural season
in that famous "black earth zone" which has been the granary of Europe
from time immemorial, but which is also, alas! periodically the seat of
dire famine.

It was July when we reached Nizhni Novgorod, on our way to an estate on
the Volga, in this "black earth" grainfield, vast as the whole of
France; but the flag of opening would not be run up for some time to
come. The Fair quarter of the town was still in its state of ten months'
hibernation, under padlock and key, and the normal town, effective as it
was, with its white Kremlin crowning the turfed and terraced heights,
possessed few charms to detain us. We embarked for Kazan.

If Kazan is an article in the creed of all