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On the Volga.
145
way, was leading me to eternal perdition. Such was the way
in which the Lord called me to Himself."
After describing his agony of mind, and the effect produced
upon him by a picture of the Last Judgment, he went on to
tell of his coming into the possession of a New Testament,
through a man who had been working in the city and had
associated with the Stundists. By reading this he found rest
and satisfaction in the truth.
" From that moment all was new for me ; I knew that I was
beginning to live. My past life seemed like a black dream.
All things round me, heaven and earth alike, were transformed.
It was with me as with the blind man, I received my spiritual
sight."
Of course his relatives and friends, the priest at their head,
began to persecute him, and he came at one time very near
banishment to Siberia. But he escaped the danger, and became
the means of converting many others.
At one station where we stopped we saw one of those
" Cross-processions" out on the fields that are so common,
their object being to implore the Deity to send rain and
avert hunger.
The scenery on the Volga becomes more and more
picturesque the farther we push up its stream. North of the city
of Samara it flows through the beautiful Shibulovski
Mountains, and the treeless steppes are replaced by forest-clad
heights. Here and there, surrounded by the dark pine woods,
is seen a white monastery, nestling amid rocks, or standing
on some hillside slope, while little villages of grey and red
houses slumber in the valleys.
On the fourth day of our journey up the Volga we passed
one of its tributaries, the Kama, which rises in the Ural
Mountains, on the Siberian frontiei’, and joins the main
stream sixty miles below Kasan. It is the great waterway to
Siberia, along which prisoners are conveyed in floating
prisons ; we saw one of these as we steamed by.
Kasan itself lies hidden from view, with the exception of
its many gilded church towers and minarets. At this place a
score of Mohammedan priests, called mooli, of the Tatar tribe,
10
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