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Rh villages, boats, and landing-stages, but in the aspect of the whole country. Everything seemed stranger, more primitive, and, in a certain sense, wilder. The banks of the Káma were less thickly inhabited and more generally covered with forests than those of the Vólga; the white-walled monasteries which had given picturesqueness and human interest to so many landscapes between Nízhni Nóvgorod and Kazán were no longer to be seen; the barges were of a ruder, more primitive type, with carved railings and spirally striped red-and-blue masts surmounted by gilded suns; and the crowds of peasants on the landing-stages were dressed in costumes whose originality of design and crude brightness of color showed that they had been little affected by the sobering and conventionalizing influence of Western civilization. The bright colors of the peasant costumes were attributable perhaps, in part, to the fact that, as it was Sunday, the youths and maidens came down to the steamer in holiday attire; but we certainly had not before seen in any part of Russia young men arrayed in blue, crimson, purple, pink, and violet shirts, nor young women dressed in lemon-yellow gowns, scarlet aprons, short pink over-jackets, and lilac head-kerchiefs.

Our four days' journey up the river Káma was not marked by any particularly noteworthy incident, but it was, nevertheless, a novel and a delightful experience. The weather was as perfect as June weather can anywhere be; the scenery was always varied and attractive, and sometimes beautifully wild and picturesque; the foliage of the poplars, aspens, and silver-birches that clothed the steep river-banks, and in places overhung the water so as almost to sweep the hurricane deck, had the first exquisite greenness and freshness of early summer; and the open glades and meadows, which the steamer frequently skirted at a distance of not more than fifteen or twenty feet, were blue with forget-me-nots or yellow with the large double flowers of the European trollius. At every landing-place peasant