While the soup was boiling and more sterlet were being grilled in their own fat, as a second course, our men pitched our tent and ran up our flag, and the butler set the table on our big rug.  It was lucky that we had purchased fish at our breakfast-place, as no sterlet had been caught at this camp.  When the soup made its appearance, we comprehended the epithet “amber” and its fame.  Of a deep gold, almost orange color, with the rich fat, and clear as a topaz, it was utterly unlike anything we had ever tasted.  We understood the despair of Parisian gourmets and cooks, and we confirmed the verdict, provisionally announced at breakfast, that the sterlet is the king of all fish.  As it is indescribable, I may be excused for not attempting to do justice to it in words.

While we feasted, the fishermen cooked themselves a kettle of less dainty fish, as a treat from us, since the fish belong to the contractor who farms the ground, not to the men.  Their meal ended, the regulation cross and prayer executed, they amiably consented to anticipate the usual hour for casting their net, in order that we might see the operation.  The net, two hundred and fifty fathoms in length, was manoeuvred down the long beach well out in the stream by one man in a boat, and by five men on shore, who harnessed themselves to a long cable by halters woven from the soft inner bark of the linden-tree.  We grasped the rope and helped them pull.  We might not have been of much real assistance, but we learned, at least, how heavy is this toil, repeated many times a day, even when the pouch reveals so slender a catch as in the present instance.  There was nothing very valuable in it, though there was variety enough, and we were deceived, for a moment, by several false sterlet.

The small samovar which we had brought gave us a steaming welcome, on our return to camp.  Perched on the fishermen’s seatless chair and stool, and on boxes, we drank our tea and began our preparations for departure, bestowing a reward on the men, who had acted their parts as impromptu hosts to perfection.  It was late; but our men burst into song, when their oars dipped in the waves, as spontaneously as the nightingales which people these shores in springtime,—­inspired probably by the full moon, which they melodiously apostrophized as “the size of a twenty-kopek bit.”  They sang of Stenka Razin, the bandit chief, who kept the Volga and the Caspian Sea in a state of terror during the reign of Peter the Great’s father; of his “poor people, good youths, fugitives, who were no thieves nor brigands, but only Stenka Razin’s workmen.”  They declared, in all seriousness, that he had been wont to navigate upon a felt rug, like the one we had seen in Piotr’s cottage; and they disputed over the exact shade of meaning contained in the words which he was in the habit of using when he summoned a rich merchant vessel to surrender as his prize.  Evidently, Stenka was no semi-epic, mythical hero to them, but a living reality.