It is a big affair. At the last official rebuilding there were sixty buildings and twenty-five hundred bazars. Many small booths are added each year, and in addition are the usual “side shows”--usual in the East. To me they were most unusual. Beautiful Caucasian dancers, real Cossacks doing wonderful feats of horsemanship, old Russian tableaux, sectional characterizations such as singers from Little Russia; northern camps; Daghestanese, Turkestanese, and Persian industries. All in all the fair comprises about eight thousand definite exhibits, some of which are very large. But the impression made is not of costly wares, designed for the homes of the rich, but simple things such as simple people need in daily life. The grand shops are there, as everywhere, but the _ensemble_ effect was of useful, cheap articles for a workaday people. The Caucasian bazars glisten with silver wares--bejeweled daggers, silver ornamented whips, bracelets, cigarette boxes, slippers adorned with hand-worked designs of gold and silver thread. Costly sounding articles, these, but in reality very cheap, and to Caucasians very necessary. To the rest of the world very pretty. A dagger is as much a part of Caucasian dress as a waistcoat of a European. All Caucasians are horsemen, and ornamented whips are as universal among them as embossed saddles among Mexicans. As for the bracelets and earrings and brooches--where is milady who will deny that these are among life’s essentials? The Russian stalls show samovars, of brass and nickel, linens--peasant linens--often exceedingly pretty and ridiculously cheap, home-pounded metal candlesticks, cups, plates, and even small implements, the various kinds of Russian costumes of the present day and of long ago--ancient styles being frequently worn on Sundays and special feast-days by the peasants for their extra dress-up clothes. Before the Persian bazars I was wont to linger longer. The stately mien, the innate dignity of these swarthy Easterners, commands interest. Their great, dark eyes suggest infinite depth lost in height, their strange, yet meaningful, expressions seem to flit from age to age as lightly and as swiftly as a woodland bird darts from bough to bough. Now soft as memory, recalling a long and mighty past; now stern and austere, remembering the hardness of the present. And the goods they sell are not of our world. Delicate embroideries, slight stuffs of silks as veil-like as dew webs on the grass of a summer morning, yet traced with bright colors by fingers we know not where--beyond the great mountains that divide Europe from Asia, far beyond the Caspian Sea. [Illustration: Tartar types--East Russia]