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CHAPTER IX.
ON THE VOLGA.
The Steamer Puschlcin—Soldiers’ Songs—Peasants "Hunting"—A Colporteur
—-British and Foreign Bible Society—Influence of the Bible—A. Peasant’s
Story of His Conversion—A " Cross Procession ’’—The Water Road to
Exile — The City of Kasan—Tartars — Nishni Novgorod—A Sapient
Governor—A. Liberal Professor of Theology—The Advantages of
Orthodoxy—i’east Dajs in Russia—An Intelligent Official.
When I stepped on board the magnificent steamer Puschlcin,
that was to take me a five days’ journey up the Volga from
Saratov to Nishni Novgorod, I could easily have imagined
myself on board an American steamer on the Hudson or the
Mississippi. But this first impression was soon dispelled; the
ugly saints’ pictures hanging in the saloon, and the ragged,
miserable-looking beings in the steerage reminded me forcibly
that I was not in America.
A large number of soldiers were on board, and on the first
two days they enlivened our passage with singing, lasting late
into the night. Their strikingly original folk-songs, or rounds,
were deeply impressive. Their weird strains, passing from
tender melancholy into outbursts of almost wild savagery,
seemed the musical expression both of the national character
and the Nature-spirit of the country. In the transition from
the softest pianissimo through crescendo to the wildest fort issimo,
mingled with sharp whistling and shouting, and again through
diminuendo until they died away in almost inaudible tones, one
could hear the winds of the steppes rising from gentlest
breezes to raging storms, or the soft rustle of the wind in the
deep and sombre forests growing into the fierce gale that
sways the tall crowns of the strongest pines, whistles through
the branches of the birch trees, and again subsides in softest
murmurs.
For the first part of the journey the weather is warm, and
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