The stream, being thus the great thoroughfare of commerce, received the popular name of _The Road to Greece_.

The Russians exported rich furs in exchange for the cloths and spices of the East.

As the Russian power extended toward the rising sun, the Volga and the Caspian Sea became the highways of a prosperous, though an interrupted, commerce.

It makes the soul melancholy to reflect upon these long, long ages of rapine, destruction and woe.

But for this, had man been true to himself, the whole of Russia might now have been almost a garden of Eden, with every marsh drained, every stream bridged, every field waving with luxuriance, every deformity changed into an object of beauty, with roads and canals intersecting every mile of its territory, with gorgeous cities embellishing the rivers' banks and the mountain sides, and cottages smiling upon every plain.