between Nízhni Nóvgorod and the month of the Káma, where there ply, during the season of navigation, about 450 steamers. As far down as the so-called "Samára bend," the river presents almost everywhere a picture of busy life and activity, and is full of steamers, barges, and great hulks, like magnified canal-boats, loaded with goods from eastern Russia, Siberia, and Central Asia. The amount of merchan-
dise produced, even in the strip of country directly tributary to the Vólga itself, is enormous. Many of the agricultural villages, such as Lískovo, which the steamer swiftly passes between Nízhni Nóvgorod and Kazán, and which seem, from a distance, to be insignificant clusters of unpainted wooden houses, load with grain 700 vessels a year.
The scenery of the upper Vólga is much more varied and picturesque than one would expect to find along a river
