The people in the cabin had their meals at different times of the day, the chief meal consisting of tea, which took place twice a day. Every time we stopped at a place a flood of beggars invaded our cabin asking for alms. The interesting point is that they received them. They were never sent empty away, and were invariably given either some coppers, some bread, or some melon. I am sure there is no country in the world where people give so readily to the poor as in Russia. One has only to walk about the streets in any Russian town to notice this fact. Here in the third-class saloon it especially struck me. I did not see one single beggar turned away without a gift of some kind. One little boy was given a piece of bread and a large slice of water-melon. At the many small stations at which we called on the banks of the river there were crowds of itinerant vendors who sold various descriptions of food--hot pies, fried fish, gigantic water-melons, apples, red currants, and cucumbers. The whole duration of each stop at any of these places was occupied by the unloading and loading of the steamer with goods. This is done by a horde of creatures in red and blue shirts called loaders, who have a kind of ledge strapped on to their backs which enables them to support enormous loads. Like big gnomes, during the whole of the stop, they are seen scurrying from the hold of the steamer to the wooden quay and back again to the steamer. On the quay itself, either placidly looking on and munching sunflower seeds or else wildly gesticulating over a bargain at a booth, a motley herd of passengers and inhabitants of the place is swarming: many-coloured, bright, ragged, and squalid, like the crowds depicted in a sacred picture waiting for a miracle or a parable under the burning sky of Palestine. Samara and Saratov have not the features which characterise the towns of the Upper Volga. They have no Kremlin, no remains of a fortress dominating the town and enclosed in old walls. Saratov is a collection of wooden houses which look as if they had been made by a Swiss artisan for the Earl’s Court Exhibition and exposed on the side of a steep hill.