The comfort of travelling third class in Russia is that there is always tea to be had. One would need the pen of Charles Lamb to sing the praises of Russian tea. The difference between our tea and Russian tea is not that Russian tea is weaker or that it has lemon in it. I have heard Englishmen say sometimes: “I don’t want any of your exquisite Russian tea; I want a good cup of strong tea.” This is as if you were to say: “I don’t want any of your soft German music; I want some nice loud English music.” It is a question of kind; not of degree. You can have tea in Russia as strong as you like. The difference is not in the strength, but in the flavour and in the fact that it is always made with boiling water, and is always fresh. But if you put a piece of lemon into a strong cup of Ceylon tea and think that the result is Russian tea you are mistaken. Russian tea is an exquisitely refreshing drink, and I sometimes wonder whether tea in England in the eighteenth century, the tea sung of by Pope and of which Dr. Johnson drank thirty-six cups running, was not probably identical with Russian tea. It certainly was not Ceylon tea. Towards ten o’clock in the morning we arrived at Ribinsk, and there I embarked on a steamer to go down the Volga as far as Nijni-Novgorod. I took a first-class ticket and received a clean deck cabin, containing a leather sofa (with no blankets or sheets) and a washing-stand with a fountain tap. We started at two o’clock in the afternoon. There were few passengers on board. The Volga was not what I had expected it would be like (what place is?). I had imagined a vast expanse of water in an illimitable plain, instead of which there was a broad, brown river, with green shelving though not steep banks, wooded with birch trees and fir trees and many kinds of shrubs; sometimes the banks consisted of sloping pastures and sometimes of cornfields. In the evening we arrived at Yaroslav, an extraordinarily picturesque little city on the top of a steep bank. All day long the sky had been grey and heavy with long piled-up clouds, but the sun as it set made for itself a thin strip of gold beneath the grey masses, and when it had sunk the masses themselves glinted like armour, and the strip beneath became a stretch of pure and luminous twilight. In the twilight the town was seen at its best. I went ashore and walked about the streets of the quiet city: a sleepy town, with trees and grass everywhere (the trees very dark in the twilight); the houses low, two-storeyed, and all painted white, with pale green roofs as white as ghosts in the dusk, ornamented with pilasters and Eighteenth-century and Empire arches and arcades. Every now and then one came across a church with the remains of the sunset making the gilt minarets glisten. The whole was a symphony in dark green, white and lilac (the sky was lilac by now). The shops were all shut, the houses shuttered, the passers-by few. The grass grows thick on the cobble-stones.