Among the second-class passengers was a party of students returning to the University of Kazan.  They exhibited all degrees of shabbiness, but this was only the modest plumage of the nightingale, apparently.  For hours they sang songs, all beautiful, all strange to us, and we listened entranced until tea, cigarettes, and songs came to an end in time to permit them a few hours of sleep before we reached their landing.  The third-class passengers, who were also lodged on the upper deck, aft, included Tatars and other Mohammedans from the Orient, who spread their prayer-rugs at sundown and went through their complicated devotions with an air of being quite oblivious to spectators.  Several got permission from the admiral to ascend to the hurricane deck.  But this, while unnecessary as a precaution against crowding or interference from their numerous Russian fellow-passengers, rendered them more conspicuous; and even this was not sufficient to make the instinctively courteous Russians stare at or notice them.

The fourth-class passengers were on the lower deck.  Among them was a company of soldiers in very shabby uniforms, who had been far down the river earning a little money by working in the harvest fields, where hands are always too few, and who were returning to garrison at Kazan.  Some enterprising passengers from Astrakhan had laid in a large stock of the delicious round watermelons and luscious cantaloupe melons.  By the time we reached Kazan, there were not many melons left in that improvised shop on the lower deck, Russians are as fond of watermelons as are the American negroes.

At Samara we had seen enormous bales of camel’s-hair, weighing upwards of eight hundred pounds, in picturesque mats of red, yellow, and brown, taken on board for the Fair.  The porters seemed to find it easy to carry them on their backs, aided only by a sort of small chair-back, with a narrow, seat-like projection at the lower end, which was fastened by straps passing over the shoulders and under the arms.  When we left Kazan, I noticed that a huge open barge was being towed upstream alongside us, that it was being filled with these bales, to lighten the steamer for the sand-bars and shallows of the upper river, and that a monotonous but very musical cadence was being repeated at intervals, in muffled tones, somewhere on board.  I went down to the cargo department of the lower deck and found the singers,—­the herculean porters.  One after another they bent their backs, and two mates hoisted the huge bales, chanting a refrain which enabled them to move and lift in unison.  The words were to the following effect:  “If all don’t grasp together, we cannot lift the weight.”  The music was sad, but irresistibly sweet and fascinating, and I stood listening and watching until the great barge was filled and dropped behind, for the company’s tug to pick up and tow to Nizhni with a string of other barges.