From the boundary between Europe and Asia the train takes us onwards past Ufa to Samara. The hills of the Urals become lower and the country flattens out again. Snow lies everywhere in a continuous sheet, and peasants are seen on the roads with sledges laden with hay, fuel, or provisions. At Batraki we pass over the Volga by a bridge nearly a mile long. The Volga is the largest river in Europe; it is 2300 miles long, and has its source in the Valdai hills (between St. Petersburg and Moscow) at a height of only 750 feet above sea-level. It flows, therefore, through most of Russia in Europe, traversing twenty governments. The right bank is high and steep, the left flat; and at its mouth in the Caspian Sea it forms a very extensive delta. The Volga is navigable almost throughout its length, and has also forty navigable tributaries. The river is frozen over for about five months in the year, and when the ice breaks up in spring with thundering cracks it often causes great damage along the banks. Crowds of vessels, boats, and rafts pass up and down the sluggish stream, as well as passenger steamers built after the pattern of the American river boats. By the Volga and its canals one can travel by steamer from the Baltic to the Caspian Sea, and from the Caspian Sea by the Volga into the Dwina and out to the White Sea. The Volga is not only an important highway for goods and passengers, but also an inexhaustible fish preserve; indeed the sturgeon and sterlet fisheries constitute its greatest wealth. When the train has rattled heavily and slowly over the Volga, it proceeds west-north-west into the very heart of holy Russia, and late on January 7, 1909, we roll into the station of Moscow, the old capital of Russia. Moscow is a type of the old unadulterated Russia, a home of the simple, honest manners and customs of olden days, of faith and honour, of a child-like, pure-hearted belief in the religion of the country, the Catholic Greek Church. In its crooked, winding, badly-paved streets swarm Tatars, Persians, and Caucasians, among Slav citizens and countrymen, those inexterminable Russian peasants who suffer and toil like slaves, look too deep into the _vodka_[20] cup on Saturday, yet are always contented, good-tempered, and jovial.