urs of sleep before we reached their landing. The
third-class passengers, who were also lodged on the upper deck, aft,
included Tatars and other Mohammedans from the Orient, who spread their
prayer-rugs at sundown and went through their complicated devotions with
an air of being quite oblivious to spectators. Several got permission
from the admiral to ascend to the hurricane deck. But this, while
unnecessary as a precaution against crowding or interference from their
numerous Russian fellow-passengers, rendered them more conspicuous; and
even this was not sufficient to make the instinctively courteous
Russians stare at or notice them.

The fourth-class passengers were on the lower deck. Among them was a
company of soldiers in very shabby uniforms, who had been far down the
river earning a little money by working in the harvest fields, where
hands are always too few, and who were returning to garrison at Kazan.
Some enterprising passengers from Astrakhan had laid in a large stock of
the delicious round watermelons and luscious cantaloupe melons. By the
time we reached Kazan, there were not many melons left in that
improvised shop on the lower deck, Russians are as fond of watermelons
as are the American negroes.

At Samara we had seen enormous bales of camel's-hair, weighing upwards
of eight hundred pounds, in picturesque mats of red, yellow, and brown,
taken on board for the Fair. The porters seemed to find it easy to carry
them on their backs, aided only by a sort of small chair-back, with a
narrow, seat-like projection at the lower end, which was fastened by
straps passing over the shoulders and under the arms. When we left
Kazan, I noticed that a huge open barge was being towed upstream
alongside us, that it was being filled with these bales, to lighten the
steamer for the sand-bars and shallows of the upper river, and that a
monotonous but very musical cadence was being repeated at intervals, in
muffled tones, somewhere on board. I went down to the cargo department
of the lower deck and found the singers,--the herculean porters. One
after another they bent their backs, and two mates hoisted the huge
bales, chanting a refrain which enabled them to move and lift in unison.
The words were to the following effect: "If all don't grasp together, we
cannot lift the weight." The music was sad, but irresistibly sweet and
fascinating, and I stood listening and watching until the great barge
was filled and dropped behind, for