MOSCOW 



485 



the afternoon of Thursday, the 20th of September, our 

 progress having been delayed by the strong westerly gales 

 that continued to prevail. The fair was over, but still a 

 brisk atmosphere of business pervaded the town, the 

 streets and bridges were crowded with traffic, and every- 

 thing denoted activity and prosperity. In a couple of hours 

 we had transferred our luggage to the railway station, 

 delighted once more to see a 

 locomotive, and to feel ourselves 

 dragged over rails after having 

 sat behind about fifteen hundred 

 horses, to say nothing of dogs 

 and reindeer. 



We reached Moscow in good 

 time on Friday morning, Sep- 

 tember 2 1st, and I lost no time 

 in presenting my letters of in- 

 troduction to M. Sabanaeff. 

 From him I learnt that he 

 had ceased to pursue his orni- 

 thological studies, and had given 

 away his collection to one of 

 the Moscow museums. 



The next day I spent an hour at the museum of the 

 University, looking over Sabanaeff 's collection of birds' 

 skins from the Ural. In the University of Kazan I 

 thought disorder reigned supreme, but in that of Moscow 

 I was obliged to admit the final triumph of chaos. There 

 was a collection of more than a thousand skins of birds, 

 specially interesting, being collected on the boundary of 

 the Eastern and Western Palaearctic regions. These 

 skins were all mixed up, the land-birds with water-birds, 

 the large with the small, crammed into drawers and 

 cupboards, with no covering over them, not even a sheet 



RUSSIAN PIPE 



