The beauties of travel in Russia begin to be seen even in the dark. We are in the station, in the midst of a crowd of people, who seem to be talking all the languages of Babel; such a jargon does the Russian, Polish, and German make, when all are spoken at the same time by an impatient multitude. We are to wait an hour for the train to leave, and that will bring it near to midnight. If we spend the night here, there is no train until to-morrow night at the same hour, and we shall therefore be as badly off when it comes. It is better to go on and make a night of it. Twelve hours will bring us to St. Petersburg, and then we can rest. There are no _sleeping_ cars. We must sit up or lounge the best way we can. It is now eleven o’clock and is getting to be dark. But we are so far north that the days are long, and the night will be very short. At midnight we curl up in the corner of the seat, and the train starts as we go to sleep. At two o’clock in the morning we awake, and it is broad daylight! At three we enter _Dunaberg_, a large town of small houses; 27,000 inhabitants: the most of the buildings are of wood, and only one story high, like the little farm-houses scattered over the country. It is well fortified, though it is hardly worth fighting about. John the Terrible captured Dunaberg in 1577, and the Swedes took it in 1600. The railroad station-house towers above the dwellings, that look like ant-hills scattered around. We stop a few minutes only, and push on through vast quantities of charcoal and railroad fuel collected here, and pine forest succeed, and white birch-trees, and over a flat, uninteresting country. The sun rose between four and five o’clock, and at a wayside station we were refreshed with a cup of coffee. The night was over, and the shortest I ever spent with my clothes on. We now pass tilled fields, and at one time we counted twenty villages of low, small houses in sight at one time, as we rushed along. The grain is well up, and with a warm summer will come to maturity. Wide tracts of land are destitute of vegetation; and with the evidences of want of agricultural knowledge, and the brevity of the summer, it is easy to see that these crowded villages may be pinched for want of food in a bad season. These famines have sometimes reached the cities, and the sufferings of Moscow in 1600 were not exceeded by the horrors of Jerusalem besieged by Titus. One hundred and twenty-seven thousand dead bodies remained for some days unburied in the streets, and 500,000 perished.