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Steam-tugs and small passenger steamers now tow great numbers of flat-boats of large capacity; and transportation by this mode of conveyance is very cheap. The Volga is the largest river in Europe. Measured through its entire windings it has a length of twenty-four hundred miles from its rise in the Valdai Hills, five hundred and fifty feet above sea-level, to its outlet into the Caspian Sea.
Though the Volga is numbered among the European rivers, and has its sources on the Valdaï hills between the European cities, St. Petersburg and Moscow, it is a frontier stream, and seemed intended to form the natural line of demarcation between two parts of the world between two worlds. Up to the middle of the Sixteenth Century, Kasan was the advanced guard of the Tartar hordes.
It is proper to explain that a troika is a team of three horses abreast, the douga is the yoke above the shaft-horse's neck, and Valdai is the town on the Moscow and St. Petersburg road where the best and most famous bells of Russia are made. Away, away, along the road The fiery troika bounds, While 'neath the douga, sadly sweet, The Valdai bell resounds.
Petersburg have their equivalents in the hard schists and quartz rocks with gold veins in the heart of the Ural mountains, the equally soft red and green Devonian marls of the Valdai Hills are represented on the western flank of that chain by hard, contorted, and fractured limestones." But these, and other such admissions, seem to go for little.
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