That settled him, and he retreated.  That evening he and the friend with whom he seemed to be traveling talked most entertainingly in the little saloon, after supper.  The friend, a round, rosy, jolly man, dressed in ordinary European clothes, was evidently proud of his flow of language, and liked to hear himself talk.  Actors, actresses, and theatres in Russia, from the middle of the last century down to the present day, were his favorite topic, on which he declaimed with appropriate gestures and very noticeable management of several dimples in his cheeks.  As a matter of course, he considered the present day degenerate, and lauded the old times and dead actors and actresses only.  It seemed that the longer they had been dead, the higher were their merits.  He talked very well, also, about books and social conditions.

The progress of the weak-kneed steamer against wind and current was very slow and uncertain, and we never knew when we should reach any given point.  Even the mouths of the rivers were not so exciting or important in nature as they used to look to me when I studied geography.  I imparted to the captain my opinion that his engine was no better than a samovar.  He tried hard to be angry, but a glance at that ridiculous machine convinced him of the justice of my comparison, and he broke into a laugh.

We left the steamer at Yaroslavl (it was bound for Rybinsk), two hundred and forty-one miles above Nizhni-Novgorod, and got our first view of the town at daybreak.  It stands on the high west bank of the river, but is not so picturesque as Nizhni.  Access to the town is had only through half a dozen cuts and ravines, as at Nizhni; and what a singular town it is!  With only a little over thirty thousand inhabitants, it has seventy-seven churches, besides monasteries and other ecclesiastical buildings.  There are streets which seem to be made up chiefly of churches,—­churches of all sizes and colors, crowned with beautiful and fantastic domes, which, in turn, are surmounted by crosses of the most charming and original designs.

Yaroslavl, founded in 1030, claims the honor of having had the first Russian theatre, and to have sheltered Biron, the favorite of the Empress Anna Ioannovna (a doubtful honor this), with his family, during nineteen years of exile.  But its architectural hints and revelations of ancient fashions, forms, and customs, are its chief glory, not to be obscured even by its modern renown for linen woven by hand and by machinery.  For a person who really understands Russian architecture,—­ not the architecture of St. Petersburg, which is chiefly the invention of foreigners,—­Yaroslavl and other places on the northern Volga in this neighborhood, widely construed, are mines of information and delight.  However, as there are no books wherewith a foreigner can inform himself on this subject, any attempt at details would not only seem pedantic, but would be incomprehensible without tiresome explanations and