rolled the blankets and pillows with which we had provided ourselves in anticipation of the absence of beds, and bivouacked, as Russian travelers are accustomed to do, on the long leather-covered couches that occupy most of the floor space in a Russian steamer, and that make the cabin look a little like an English railway carriage with all the partitions removed.
About five o'clock in the morning I was awakened by the persistent blowing of the steamer's whistle, followed by the stoppage of the machinery, the jar of falling gang-planks, and the confused trampling of a multitude of feet over my head. Presuming that we had arrived at Kazán, I went on deck. The sun was about an hour high and the river lay like a quivering mass of liquid silver between our steamer and the smooth, vividly green slopes of the high western bank. On the eastern side, and close at hand, was a line of the black hulls with yellow roofs and deck-houses that serve along the Vólga as landing-stages, and beside them lay half a dozen passenger steamers, blowing their whistles at intervals and flying all their holiday flags. Beyond them and just above high-water mark on the barren, sandy shore was a row of heterogeneous wooden shops and lodging-houses, which, but for a lavish display of color in walls and roofs, would have suggested a street of a mining settlement in Idaho or Montana. There were in the immediate foreground no other buildings; but on a low bluff far away in the distance, across a flat stretch of marshy land, there could be seen a mass of walls, towers, minarets, and shining domes, which recalled to my mind in some obscure way the impression made upon me as a child by a quaint picture of "Vanity Fair" in an illustrated copy of the "Pilgrim's Progress." It was the famous old Tatár city of Kazán. At one time, centuries ago, the bluff upon which the krémlin of Kazán stands was washed by the waters of the Vólga; but it has been left four or five miles inland by the slow shifting of the river's bed to the westward; and the distant view of the
