summer day of the Arctic regions. Regularly at that season
several English ships cast anchor in the bay. A fair was held on
the beach. Traders came from a distance of many hundreds of miles
to the only mart where they could exchange hemp and tar, hides
and tallow, wax and honey, the fur of the sable and the
wolverine, and the roe of the sturgeon of the Volga, for
Manchester stuffs, Sheffield knives, Birmingham buttons, sugar
from Jamaica and pepper from Malabar. The commerce in these
articles was open. But there was a secret traffic which was not
less active or less lucrative, though the Russian laws had made
it punishable, and though the Russian divines pronounced it
damnable. In general the mandates of princes and the lessons of
priests were received by the Muscovite with profound reverence.
But the authority of his princes and of his priests united could
not keep him from tobacco. Pipes he could not obtain; but a cow's
horn perforated served his turn. From every Archangel fair rolls
of the best Virginia speedily found their way to Novgorod and
Tobolsk.

The commercial intercourse between England and Russia made some
diplomatic intercourse necessary. The diplomatic intercourse
however was only occasional. The Czar had no permanent minister
here. We had no permanent minister at Moscow; and even at
Archangel we had no consul. Three or four times in a century
extraordinary embassies were sent from Whitehall to the Kremlin
and from the Kremlin to Whitehall.

The English embassies had historians whose narratives may still
be read with interest. Those historians described vividly, and
sometimes bitterly, the savage ignorance and the squalid poverty