The climate, when Tzaritsin is passed, grows hotter and hotter, and the breeze made by the steamer only increases the heat. The moon rises and for a while the sky is still tinged with the stain of the sunset in the west, and the water is luminous with a living whiteness. Then, rapidly, because the twilight does not last long here, comes the darkness and with it something strange and wonderful. One is aware of an extraordinary fragrance in the air. It is not merely the sweetness of summer night. It is a pungent and aromatic incense which pervades the whole atmosphere; warm and delicious and filled with the whole essence of summer. It is intoxicating and comes over one like a great wave, a breath of Elysium; a message, as it were, from the great white fields. And the night with its web of stars, and the dark waters, and the thin line of the far-off banks, make one once more lose all sense of reality. One has reached another world, the nether-world perhaps; one breathes “The scent of alien meadows far away,” and one feels as if one were sailing down the river of oblivion to the harbours of Proserpine. And this wonderful sweetness comes, I ascertained, from the new-mown hay, the mowing of which takes place late here. The hay lies in great masses over the steppes, embalming the midnight air and turning the world into paradise. In reaching Astrakan one is plunged into the atmosphere of the East. On the quays there is an infinite quantity of booths containing every kind of fruit and a coloured herd of people living in the dust and the dirt; splendidly squalid, noisy as parrots, and busy doing nothing, like wasps. The railway to Astrakan is not yet finished, so one is obliged to return to Tzaritsin by steamer if one wishes to get back to the centre of Russia. I pursued this course; and from Tzaritsin took the train for Tambov. The train started from Tzaritsin at two o’clock in the morning; I arrived at the station at midnight, and at this hour the station was crammed with people. Imagine a huge high waiting-room with three tables d’hôte parallel to each other in the centre of it; at one end of the hall a buffet; on the sides of it under the windows are tables and long seats padded with leather, partitioned off and forming open cubicles. These seats are always occupied, and the occupants go to bed on them, wrapped up in blankets, and propped up by pillows, bags, rugs, baskets, kettles, and other impedimenta. The whole of this refreshment hall is filled with sleeping figures. There are people lying asleep on the window sills and others on chairs placed together. Some merely lay their heads on the table d’hôte, and fall into a profound slumber. It is like the scene in “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,” when sleep overtook the inhabitants of the castle. There are a bookstall and a newspaper kiosk. The bookstall contains--as usual--the works of Jerome K. Jerome and Conan Doyle, some translations of French