A woman about forty-five years of age accompanied them into the room, then planted herself with her back against the wall near us, which was as far away from her charges as space permitted. She was the "sheep-dog," and we soon saw that, while discreetly oblivious of the smiles, glances, and behavior of her lambs,-as all well-trained society sheep-dogs are,-she kept darting sharp looks at us as though we were doing something quite out of the way and improper. By that time we had begun to suspect, for various reasons, that the Nizhni Fair is intended for men, not for-ladies. But we were determined quietly to convince ourselves of the state of affairs, so we stood our ground, dallied with our tea, drank an enormous quantity of it, and kept our eyes diligently in the direction where those of the sheep-dog should have been, but never were.
Their very bad singing over, the lambs disappeared to the adjoining veranda. The young merchants slipped out, one by one. The waiters began to carry great dishes of peaches, and other dainty fruits,-all worth their weight in gold in Russia, and especially at Nizhni,-together with bottles of champagne, out to the veranda. When we were satisfied, we went to bed, but not to sleep. The peaches kept that party on the veranda and in the rooms below exhilarated until nearly daylight. I suppose the duenna did her duty and sat out the revel in the distant security of the dining-room. Several of her charges added a number of points to our store of information the next day, at the noon breakfast hour, when the duenna was not present.
We began to think that we understood our Moscow friend's enigmatic smile, and to regret that we had not met him and his wife at the Fair, as we had originally arranged to do.
The far-famed Fair of Nizhni Novgorod-"Makary," the Russians call it, from the town and monastery of St. Makary, sixty miles farther down the Volga, where it was held from 1624 until the present location was adopted in 1824-was a disappointment to us. There is no denying that. Until railways and steamers were introduced into these parts, and facilitated the distribution of goods, and of commonplaceness and monotony, it probably merited all the extravagant praises of its picturesqueness and variety which have been lavished upon it. The traveler arrives there with indefinite but vast expectations. A fancy dress ball on an enormous scale, combined with an International Exposition, would seem to be the nearest approach possible to a description of his confused anticipations. That is, in a measure, what one sees; and, on the other hand, it is exactly the reverse of what he sees. I must confess that I think our disappointment was partly our own fault. Had we, like most travelers who have written extravagantly about the Fair, come to it fresh from a stay of (at most) three weeks in St. Petersburg and Moscow only, we should have been much impressed by the variety of types and goods, I have no doubt. But we had spent nearly two years in the land, and were familiar with the types and goods of the capitals and of other places, so that there was little that was new to us. Consequently, though we found the Fair very interesting, we were not able to excite ourselves to any extravagant degree of amazement or rapture.
The Fair proper consists of a mass of two-story "stone" (brick and cement) buildings, inclosed on three sides by a canal in the shape of a horseshoe. Through the centre runs a broad boulevard planted with trees, ending at the open point of the horseshoe in the residence occupied by the governor during the Fair (he usually lives in the Kremlin of the Upper Town), the post-office, and other public buildings. Across the other end of the boulevard and "rows" of the Gostinny Dvor, with their arcades full of benches occupied by fat merchants or indolent visitors, and serving as a chord to the arc of the horseshoe, run the "Chinese rows," which derive their name from the style of their curving iron roofs and their ornaments, not from the nationality of the merchants, or of the goods sold there. It is, probably, a mere accident that the wholesale shops for overland tea are situated in the Chinese rows. It is a good place to see the great bales of "Kiakhta tea," still in their wrappings of rawhides, with the hair inside and the hieroglyphical addresses, weights, and so forth, cut into the skins, instead of being painted on them, just as they have been brought overland from Kiakhta on the Chinese border of Siberia. Here, also, rises the great Makary Cathedral, which towers conspicuously above the low-roofed town. Inside the boundary formed by this Belt Canal, no smoking is allowed in the streets, under penalty of twenty-five rubles for each offense. The drainage system is flushed from the river every night; and from the ventilation towers, which are placed at short intervals, the blue smoke of purifying fires curls reassuringly. Great care is necessary in this department, and the sanitary conditions, though as good as possible, are never very secure. The whole low sandspit is often submerged during the spring floods, and the retreating waters leave a deposit of slime and debris behind them, which must be cleared away, besides doing much damage to the buildings.
The peculiarity of this Makary Fair is that nothing is sold by sample, in modern fashion; the whole stock of goods is on hand, and is delivered at once to purchasers. The taciturn, easy-going merchants in those insignificant-looking shops of the Gostinny Dvor "rows," and, to a small extent, in the supplementary town which has sprung up outside the canal, set the prices for tea and goods of all sorts all over Russia and Siberia for the ensuing year. Contracts for the future are dated, and last year's bills fall due, at "Makary." It is hard to realize.
All the firms with whose shops we had been familiar in Petersburg and Moscow had establishments here, and, at first, it seemed not worth while to inspect their stocks, with which we felt perfectly acquainted. But we soon discovered that our previous familiarity enabled us to distinguish certain articles which are manufactured for the "Fair" trade exclusively, and which are never even shown in the capitals. For example, the great porcelain houses of St. Petersburg manufacture large pipe-bowls, ewers (with basins to match) of the Oriental shape familiar to the world in silver and brass, and other things, all decorated with a deep crimson bordering on magenta, and with gold. The great silk houses of Moscow prepare very rich and very costly brocades of this same deep crimson hue, besprinkled with gold and with tiny bouquets of bright flowers, or in which the crimson is prominent. They even copy the large, elaborate patterns from the robes of ancient Doges of Venice. All these, like the pipes and ewers, are made to suit the taste of customers in Bokhara and other Eastern countries, where a man's rank is, to a certain degree, to be recognized by the number and richness of the khalati which he can afford to wear at one time. This is one of the points in which the civilization of the East coincides very nearly with the civilization of the West. The khalat is a sort of dressing-gown, with wide sleeves, which is girt about the waist with a handsome shawl; but it would strike a European that eight or ten of these, worn one on top of the other, might conduce to the preservation of vanity, but not to comfort, in the hot countries where the custom prevails. The Bokhariots bring to the Fair khalati of their own thin, strong silk, in hues more gaudy than those of the rainbow and the peacock combined, which are always lined with pretty green and white chintz, and can be bought for a very reasonable price in the Oriental shops, together with jeweled arms and ornaments, rugs, and a great variety of fascinating wares.