ch steady keenness
as to make the climate of the exposed parts of the Black Sea coast
almost as wintry as that of the White Sea. At Odessa in the early
days of October both our hotel and the private houses we had occasion
to enter had already put up double doors and windows, and people
lived in apartments as hermetically closed as if their homes had
been in St. Petersburg.

We slept at Baidar, a Tartar village, where a maiden of that Moslem
race was the only attendant at the Russian inn, and on the morrow
we drove in three hours to Sebastopol, a distance of forty-two
versts.

Sebastopol has still not a little of that Pompeian look which it
bore on the day after its surrender to the Western Allies in 1856.
We drove through miles of ruins, the roofless walls staring at
us from the dismantled doors and windows, the dust from the
rubbish-heaps of brick and mortar blinding us at every turning
of the streets, though, we were told, the city is looking up and
thriving, and both house-rent and building-ground are rising in
price from day to day.

We had to wait two days for the "Olga," detained by stress of weather,
and it was with a hope of enlivening ourselves that, under the
escort of the English Consul, a Crimean veteran who takes care of
the heroic dead, and actually lives with as well as for them, we
drove out to some of the eleven English cemeteries, to the house
where Lord Raglan died, and the monument marking the spot where
"the six hundred rode into the jaws of death"--those localities
made forever memorable by a war than which none was ever undertaken
with less distinct aims, none fought with greater valour, none
brought to an end with less important results.

We left Sebastopol at three in the afternoon in the "Olga," and
landed at Odessa in the morning at ten. Throughout the first week
after our arrival, we never caught a single glimpse of the sun.
Odessa, like Sebastopol, like Kertch, like Astrakhan, and other
places lying on the edge of the Russian Steppe, seems habitually,
under the influence of the wind in peculiar quarters, to be haunted
by fogs that set in at sunrise and only sometimes clear off after
sunset. During this gloomy state of the atmosphere the night is
usually warmer than the day.

[Illustration: PLACE TUREMNAJA ODESSA.]

Odessa has a magnificent position, for it lies high on ravines,
which give it a wide command over its large harbour, lately improved,
as well as on the open sea and coas