Tzaritsin itself is a great trade centre; the best caviare and the best water-melons are to be obtained here. Most of the third-class passengers got out at Tzaritsin. I was amused by the process, which I watched on shore, of a huge block of stone being hauled up a hill by a gang of workmen. The spectacle was so utterly unlike anything one sees in other countries. Pieces of rock are also hauled up hills in other lands, but the manner in which it is done is entirely different. Seven men were hauling the rope; they were ragged, dirty, and dressed in red and blue shirts, stained and dusty, while their tufts of yellow hair stuck out of their tattered peaked caps. By the block of stone stood the leader of the gang. Then suddenly, when he thought the time had come, he intoned a chant, a solo, about fifteen notes, which might have been written in the Scotch scale (the scale of G major without the F sharp), plaintive and unexpected; then he beat time with a wave of his left hand, and at the fourth beat the whole gang chimed in, continuing the melody in parts and hauling as they sang, and then abruptly ending on the dominant. Then after a short pause the leader again intoned his solo and the chorus again made harmonies to the plaintive melody, and this was repeated till the block of stone was hauled up the hill. What I should like to know is when people of a country leave off singing natural folk-song tunes like “Ca’ the Yowes,” for instance, and when they begin to substitute for them the répertoire of the music-hall, How much education and progress is necessary to effect the change? I wonder whether in a hundred years’ time Russian song will have disappeared as it exists now, and whether its place will be taken by the music-hall refrains of London. This is not meant to be said in dispraise of music-halls. I appreciate and immensely enjoy music-hall tunes, especially the tunes of the stately music-halls of England. I think the English people have a genius, which other countries try in vain to imitate, for creating catching, rhythmical tune mixed with broad and sometimes inspired farce, and their achievements in this province have certainly added to the gaiety of nations, but I am for rendering to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s. The music-hall tune is a thing of the town, and songs like the “Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond,” “Come o’er the Sea, Charlie,” “Ca’ the Yowes,” “Dans le jardin de mon père,” and the songs of the Volga are things of the country, and I think it is melancholy that the latter should disappear and that their place should be usurped entirely by the town-mouse and his music. But perhaps this does not happen.