Page:The Boy Travellers in the Russian Empire.djvu/411

Rh to partake of it. A knife lies on the top of the loaf; the guest himself cuts the loaf, and must be careful to dip the slice in the salt before placing it in his mouth.

In their descent of the Volga, our friends passed a succession of villages on either bank, and occasionally a town or city of importance. The day after leaving Kazan they stopped at Simbirsk, the capital of the province of the same name, and the centre of a considerable trade. It is on the right bank of the river, and has a population of twenty-five or thirty thousand.

About a hundred miles farther down the Volga is Samara, which generally resembles Simbirsk, but is larger, and possesses a more extensive commerce. A railway extends from Samara to Orenburg, on the frontier of Siberia. On the other side of the Volga Samara is connected with the railway system which has its centre at Moscow. With railway and river to develop its commerce, it is not surprising that the place is prosperous, and has grown rapidly since the middle of the century.

Mr. Hegeman told the youths that many Swiss and Germans were settled along this part of the Volga, and he pointed out some of their villages as the boat steamed on her course. The Government allows them perfect freedom in religious matters, and they have an excellent system of schools which they manage at their own expense and in their own way. In other respects they are under the laws of the Empire, and their industry and enterprise have had a beneficial effect upon their Muscovite neighbors. The first of these settlers came here more than a hundred years ago; their descendants speak both German and Russian, and form quite an important part of the population.

Larger than Simbirsk and Samara rolled into one is Saratov, about a hundred miles below the city we have just described. It contains nearly a hundred thousand inhabitants; its houses are well built and spacious, and its streets are unusually broad, even for Russia. Our friends took a carriage-ride through the city, visited several of its sixteen or eighteen churches, and passed an hour or more in one of the factories devoted to the manufacture of leather goods.

Frank and Fred thought the churches were fully equal to those of any other Russian city they had seen, with the exception of a few of the most celebrated, and they greatly regretted their inability to make a fuller inspection of the place. But they consoled themselves with the reflection that they had seen the principal cities of the Empire, and the smaller ones could not offer many new and distinctive features.

In the province of Saratov they were on the border of the region of