a
temperature which would take the skin off Anglo-Saxon mouths. My tongue
was more than once blistered, on beginning to drink after they had
emptied their glasses. There is no station without its steaming samovar;
and some persons, I verily believe, take their thirty-three hot teas
between Moscow and St. Petersburg.

There is not much choice of dishes in the interior of Russia; but what
one does get is sure to be tolerably good. Even on the Beresina and the
Dnieper I have always fared better than at most of the places in our
country where "Ten minutes for refreshments!" is announced day by day
and year by year. Better a single beef-steak, where tenderness is, than
a stalled ox, all gristle and grease. But then our cooking (for the
public at least) is notoriously the worst in the civilized world; and I
can safely pronounce the Russian better, without commending it very
highly.

Some time in the night we passed the large town of Vladimir, and with
the rising sun were well on our way to the Volga. I pushed aside the
curtains, and looked out, to see what changes a night's travel had
wrought in the scenery. It was a pleasant surprise. On the right stood a
large, stately residence, embowered in gardens and orchards; while
beyond it, stretching away to the south-east, opened a broad, shallow
valley. The sweeping hills on either side were dotted with shocks of
rye; and their thousands of acres of stubble shone like gold in the
level rays. Herds of cattle were pasturing in the meadows, and the
peasants (serfs no longer) were straggling out of the villages to their
labor in the fields. The crosses and polished domes of churches sparkled
on the horizon. Here the patches of primitive forest were of larger
growth, the trunks cleaner and straighter, than we had yet seen. Nature
was half conquered, in spite of the climate, and, the first time since
leaving St. Petersburg, wore a habitable aspect. I recognized some of
the features of Russian country-life, which Puschkin describes so
charmingly in his poem of "Eugene Onaegin."

The agricultural development of Russia has been greatly retarded by the
indifference of the nobility, whose vast estates comprise the best land
of the empire, in those provinces where improvements might be most
easily introduced. Although a large portion of the noble families pass
their summers in the country, they use the season as a period of
physical and pecuniary recuperation from the dissipations of the