In the two months named, traders from nearly every European and Asiatic country gather here with every variety of goods and product that can be carried by rail, water, or caravan: grains, hides, leather, teas, metals, precious stones, fish, meats, cloths, silks, peasants' works and weavings; and the great sandbar in the river Oka of several hundred acres is covered with Siberian iron. Electricity furnishes light where needed, for it will be remembered that it is light enough in this latitude to read at midnight in summer time. Here are also royal quarters for the governor and State officials, whose social and executive residences are in the "dead city" during the entire time of the fair, in which time the governor is an absolute czar in power. To give briefly a Russian view of the famine and how it was felt in a single province and the Russian manner of dealing with it I give the following abridged account: Nijni claims to have been the first provincial government of Russia to take active measures to relieve the sufferers by famine. The first news came to the governor from reports of dry weather in his province in May, 1891, for the crops of the three preceding years had been short, and at this time the peasants had begun to ask for bread, having already sold a part of their horses and tools; and only two of the eleven districts had sufficient bread for their people. Without waiting to consult the general government, in order to save time, the governor took the responsibility upon himself of immediately purchasing one hundred and twenty-five thousand poods (a pud is about forty pounds), or twenty-two hundred tons of grain, and sent this in the early part of June to the districts most affected by the drouth. He used his influence to stop speculation in grain, Nijni being a great grain centre, and formed a commission from all the districts to carry out relief measures. It was after this that the Department of the Interior appropriated one million rubles ($550,000) to buy bread. It has been a custom in Russia that when a loan is made to the _poor peasants_ that the _rich_ peasants of the community are held equally responsible for the payment; hence _they_ have fallen into the habit of claiming an equal apportionment whenever loans have been made for relief measures in times past. Thus the Zemstvo (the elective magistrates of the village) have the power in themselves to say that they had not ordered nor asked for the grain, and refuse to receive it for those really needing it. Hence the governor of Nijni ordered that only those receiving should be charged with the loan. The whole loan here received was 6,350,000 rubles, all of which except 150,000 rubles had been distributed when we visited the district.