A world exposition, whether at Paris, or St. Louis, is a wearisome thing after the first one has been seen. The sameness, the fatiguing miles we walk in vain search for something new--none of this in Nijni. Unless one has been to Calcutta, and knows his Turkestan, his Caucasia, his Siberia, and Lapland, Nijni is fascinatingly new. It is a people’s fair above all else. A practical thing. The annual exchange of thousands of small things from the mysterious East and the frozen North, the one ample market of near a million peasants from the interior governments of Russia. The tourist will not find preparations to please his extravagant tastes. Utility is the underlying aim of the Nijni fair, but utility from the standpoint of the needs of the people who contribute to its upkeep and depend upon its resources. And the needs of the vast Tartar horde, of stolid muzhiks, and hardy peoples from polar regions, are wondrously unlike the needs of Europe and the western world. The bazars of Persia, of Daghestan, and Tashkent range side by side with booths of pelts from Archangel and Nova Zembla and, frequently enough to be noticed, a stall of old Cathay attended by narrow-eyed Orientals in rich, blue silks, their plaited pigtails glistening black against the bright cloth. A few enterprising European merchants are represented, but only a few. I met one surprise at a picture post-card counter. The proprietor, a native Nijni Novgorodian, asked me if I spoke English. When I answered that I did, he asked me if I had ever been in England. When I again answered yes, he asked if I had been also in America. Once more I told him yes. Then he came to the point. “Have you ever been in Boston?” “Yes, I know Boston quite well,” I replied. A wide smile of genuine joy spread over his face as he grasped both my hands and wrung them in excited cordiality--enthusiastic to a degree utterly foreign to Boston. Early in his life he had spent four years in Boston. Since then he has never ceased regretting his inability to return there. His uncompromising loyalty to what he called “the best city on earth” would have done credit to any Bostonian of Mayflower lineage.