454

[ cis?
LIFE OT UOBDEN.

1847. avenue of wooden booths full of merchandise, and amidst
2" 48. crowds of people to the hotel, where I found comfortabl?
quarters. Baron Alexander Meyendorff called, chief of :
kind of Board of Trade at Moscow, an active-minded &
intelligent German, possessing much statistical knowleds?
about Russian trade and manufactures. . . . He thinks or
geographical and climatical features of Russia will sini
prevent its being anything but a great village, as he ter® ¢
it, it being such a vast, unbroken plain; there are no var jotic?
of climate or occupations, and as the weather is intensely
cold for half the year, every persou wants double the
quantity of land which would suffice to maintain him
more genial climates; as there is no coal, the pine forest?
are as necessary a8 his rye field. Wherever the wint®®
endures for upwards of half the year, the population pt
a8 a general rule be thin.”
“ Nishni Novogorod, August 28th.—The Bokhara card?
arrived yesterday, bringing about a thousand hundred weigh?
of cotton from Asia, of a short staple like our Surats, with
skins, common prints, dressing-gowns of silk and other
articles. I visited three merchants, some of them handsom®
swarthy men ; their goods were brought upon camels as f° 88
Orenberg; the journey from Bokhara to Nishni occupies abot’
three months. This caravan had been stopped by a tribe °
the Kirghese. One of these men, a knowing, talkative fellow’
bad been in London and picked up a few words of Englis>
In the evening dined and took tes with Baron A. de Meye™
dorff, and met Baronoff, the great printer and manufactur "
sn energetic and sensible man. . . . He has taken some 18
on lease in the territory of the Khan of Khiva for growiné
madder for his print works; he says that the madder he got
from Agia is cheaper than that which he formerly got fro®
France and Holland, in the proportion of two aud a half %
one.”