the inundation, and enjoy the fresh spring
breeze. For a time health becomes firmer;
but, on the retiring of the waters, the
temperature also sinks, and snow often falls upon
the young buds and blossoms. The poor
people of the lower town, who had abandoned
their houses during the flood, go back into
them while they are damp, and have in their
cellars pools of slime. The pools of water left
in various places after the retirement of the
flood soon become putrid. The whole ground,
muddy and slimy, yields for a time death-
dealing exhalations. There is a terrible
mortality. The thawing of the snow, and saturation
of the soil, converts most of the streets of
Kazan into bogs, through which horses have
sometimes to plunge up to the haunches. As
the intense cold of winter comes at last to be
succeeded by the intense heat of a short
summer, all this mud dries up, and forms a dust
which sweeps hither and thither in dense
clouds, whitening those who go abroad, and
almost choking them. From the heat and
dust all fly who can. While The Cauldron is
thus boiling a gallop, they who have country
estates fly to them; they who have country
friends go out on visits.

The excessive heat lasts only for two or
three months. Daring those months the
fresh vegetation first begotten on the mud
left by the inundation is burnt up; rivers,
lakes, and green leaves almost disappear:
the bottom of the Cauldron becomes red-hot:
for stone pavements burn the foot through a
boot-sole, and there is often not a breath of
wind. There is freshness in the air only for
a short time after sunset—for an hour and a
half; after that time a heavy dew begins to
fall, cold mists rise, and a stroller who may
have been scorched when he came out of
doors, is sent home damp and shivering.
During this season, the place is full of
agues, fevers, colic, and inflammatory
disorders.

The Autumn is merely nominal. There is
no real transition season between fire and
frost. The snow is in September often very
deep; a pitiless sleet beats down over the
place; rain and snow follow at intervals.
During the day it generally blows hard, and
during the night it freezes. Sudden storms
arise which shatter windows, tear up trees, sink
barks, and have been known to blow a large
roof up into the air, and cast it down at a
distance of a hundred yards from the dwelling
that it covered. The mortality in autumn is
more terrible than the mortality of summer.
Of agues and fevers, there die yearly eighteen
hundred out of fifty thousand dwellers in
Kazan; a ratio of thirty-six out of each
thousand. On the whole, a hundred and ten
people die in Kazan for every hundred that
are born; but the population is kept up
by an influx of new-corners.

Winter brings the fashionable people back.
They come in October. Towards the end of
November the Volga freezes. In December,
rivers, lakes, and streams are all bound up;
the snow is seven or eight feet deep; the
theatre is for a time closed; travellers, and
even horses, are sometimes frozen to death;
and many a poor crow falls as a stiff lump
upon the ground. The people stew
themselves at slow fires in unwholesome rooms;
but they go a visiting, and there is no cessation
to the balls. In March the sun again begins
to assert its power; and, wherever it shines,
it warms. On one side of a street a pedestrian
may walk in the sun and be oppressed by
heat; he may cross over to the shade,
where his teeth will soon be chattering, and
he will be in the grip of a hard frosty
wind.

Then comes the inundation again, and
then come the thousand barks that bring to
the warehouses of Kazan merchandise from
the Ural, Astrakhan, Siberia, Persia, China,
and the eastern world. This trade is highly
profitable, and the merchant class of Kazan—
we have spoken hitherto only of the nobles
—becomes very opulent. One merchant had
grown in a very short time from the condition
of a poor Tchouvash peasant to be the
owner of millions of roubles. Kazan itself
produces leather, soap, tallow candles and a
peculiar kind of cloth. Its soap had once a
reputation that half covered the globe, but
tricks of trade have spoiled the article and
damaged its reputation. The leather trade
finds work in Kazan for fifty very large and
a great number of little tan-yards. They turn
out in the year nearly four hundred thousand
skins. There are seven or eight candle-
factories; one of them is for making candles
with a hollow wick, according to a plan
invented by a Tartar merchant. Candles
so made draw up a constant air current,
and give a particularly bright and steady
light.

The Kazan merchants generally lead a
retired and quiet life; and, indeed, look upon
the pleasures of the nobles as wicked
indulgence of the flesh. Some, of course, give the
education of nobles to their children, and
spend much of their means in pleasure;
but, as a rule, they are remarkable for their
devotion to religious duties. They are the
re-builders of all churches destroyed by
fire: most of the churches now standing
in Kazan have been built by them. The
belfry to the Church of the Ascension was the
gift of a single merchant who spent on it
eighty thousand roubles. A whole church
was built by another of the same class in a
suburb called the Admiralty. Ask merchants
of Kazan to subscribe to a hospital or house
of charity, and most of them will probably
regret their want of means. Ask them for
money towards church-building, the decoration
of a shrine, the encasing of a relic, the
mounting and appointing of a grand religious
procession, and they are all ready to give
whatever sum is needed. The dissipated
nobles, on the other hand—they consist chiefly