nd it
in ashes from a late fire. He then hurried on to Nishney-Novgorod, the
place of the greatest fair in the world, where the traffic brings
traders from the ends of the earth, and where the trade amounts to
nineteen millions sterling a-year. He then traversed the property of
General Sheremetieff, an estate of _two days' journey_, with a hundred
thousand serfs--a comfortable race when under a good master, each head
of a family having a farm, and paying its rent, part in produce and part
in work. The people appear to be a gay race--singing every where;
singing on the roads, singing at work, and singing at cutting up their
cabbages for the national luxury of _saurkraut_.

At length was seen looming in the west, with all its steeples and domes,
the queen of the wilderness, Moscow the Magnificent--the most
frequently-burned of all cities, and, as Sir George observes, the most
_retaliatory_ on the burners--it having been burned to embers _four_
times, and each time having seen the incendiary nation ruined. It must
be admitted, however, that the revenge, however sure, was slow, for it
seldom occurred in less than a couple of centuries!--Napoleon's fate
being the only instance of promptitude on this point.

From Moscow to St Petersburg, a macadamised road of seven hundred versts
conveyed the traveller to the northern city of the Czar, where, on the
8th of October, he terminated a journey from Ochotsk, of about seven
thousand miles. In eight days from St Petersburg he reached Hamburg, and
in five days more arrived in London, having rounded the globe in a
period of nineteen months and twenty-six days!

We have given an abstract of this work with the more satisfaction, that
it not merely supplies a certain knowledge of vast regions of which the
European world knows little; but that it gives a favourable view of the
condition, the habits, and the temper, of the multitudes of our fellow
men, spread over those immense spaces of the globe. Personally, of
course, a man of the official rank and individual intelligence of the
writer, might expect the hospitality of the Russian employes. But he
seems to have been met with general kindness--to have experienced no
injury, no obstacle, and no extortion; and, on the whole, having
exhibited the good sense which disregards the _inevitable_ annoyances of
all journeys in distant countries, to have escaped all the severer ones
which an ill-tempered traveller naturally brings upon himself. But