It is probably a vulgar detail, but I must chronicle the fact that the cooking on these Volga steamers—­on the line we patronized, at least —­is among the very best to be found in Russia, in my experience.  On the voyage upstream, when they are well supplied with sterlet and other fish, all alive, from Astrakhan, the dinners are treats for which one may sigh in vain in the capitals of St. Petersburg and Moscow, with their mongrel German-French-Russian cookery.  The dishes are very Russian, but they are very good.

I remember one particularly delicious concoction was composed of fresh sterlet and sour cabbage, with white grapes on top, baked to a brown crispness.

We arrived at our wharf on the Volga front of the old town of Nizhni Novgorod about five o’clock in the afternoon.  Above us rose the steep green hills on whose crest stood the Kremlin, containing several ancient churches, the governor’s house, and so forth.  On a lower terrace, to right and left, stood monasteries and churches intermingled with shops and mediocre dwellings.  The only noteworthy church was that in front of us, with its picturesque but un-Russian rococo plaster decoration on red brick, crowned by genuine Russian domes and crosses of elaborately beautiful patterns.

But we did not pause long to admire this part of the view, which was already familiar to us.  What a change had come over the scene since we had bidden it farewell on our way downstream!  Then everything was dead, or slumbering, except the old town, the city proper; and that had not seemed to be any too much awake or alive.  The Fair town, situated on the sand-spit between the Volga and the mouth of the Oka, stood locked up and deserted, as it had stood since the close of last year’s Fair.  Now, as we gazed over the prow of the steamer, we could see the bridge across the Oka black with the swarming masses of pedestrians and equipages.

The steamer company allows its patrons to sleep (but not to eat) on board the night after arrival and the night before starting, and we availed ourselves of the privilege, having heard that it was often no easy matter to secure accommodations in the Fair, and having no intention of returning to our former hotel, miles from all the fun, in the upper town, if we could help it.

The only vacant rooms in the Fair seemed to be at the “best hotel,” to which we had been recommended, with a smile of amusement which had puzzled us, by a Moscow friend, an officer in the army.  Prices were very high at this hotel, which, like American summer hotels, is forced to make its hay for the year during the season of six weeks, after which it is locked up.  Our room was small; the floor, of rough boards, was bare; the beds were not comfortable.  For the same price, in Petersburg or Moscow, we should have had a spacious room on the bel etage, handsomely furnished, with rugs on an inlaid floor.