ty sheep-dogs are,--she kept darting sharp looks at us as though
we were doing something quite out of the way and improper. By that time
we had begun to suspect, for various reasons, that the Nizhni Fair is
intended for men, not for--ladies. But we were determined quietly to
convince ourselves of the state of affairs, so we stood our ground,
dallied with our tea, drank an enormous quantity of it, and kept our
eyes diligently in the direction where those of the sheep-dog should
have been, but never were.

Their very bad singing over, the lambs disappeared to the adjoining
veranda. The young merchants slipped out, one by one. The waiters began
to carry great dishes of peaches, and other dainty fruits,--all worth
their weight in gold in Russia, and especially at Nizhni,--together
with bottles of champagne, out to the veranda. When we were satisfied,
we went to bed, but not to sleep. The peaches kept that party on the
veranda and in the rooms below exhilarated until nearly daylight. I
suppose the duenna did her duty and sat out the revel in the distant
security of the dining-room. Several of her charges added a number of
points to our store of information the next day, at the noon breakfast
hour, when the duenna was not present.

We began to think that we understood our Moscow friend's enigmatic
smile, and to regret that we had not met him and his wife at the Fair,
as we had originally arranged to do.

The far-famed Fair of Nizhni Novgorod--"Makary," the Russians call it,
from the town and monastery of St. Makary, sixty miles farther down the
Volga, where it was held from 1624 until the present location was
adopted in 1824--was a disappointment to us. There is no denying that.
Until railways and steamers were introduced into these parts, and
facilitated the distribution of goods, and of commonplaceness and
monotony, it probably merited all the extravagant praises of its
picturesqueness and variety which have been lavished upon it. The
traveler arrives there with indefinite but vast expectations. A fancy
dress ball on an enormous scale, combined with an International
Exposition, would seem to be the nearest approach possible to a
description of his confused anticipations. That is, in a measure, what
one sees; and, on the other hand, it is exactly the reverse of what he
sees. I must confess that I think our disappointment was partly our own
fault. Had we, like most travelers who have written extravagantly about
the Fair, c