in the year. I have
been vainly taxing my brain to guess what may become of the captains,
mates and crews of the 700 steamers, and of the 5,000 heavy barges
with which the river is now swarming; of the porters, agents, clerks,
and other officials at the various stations; of the thousands of
women employed to carry all the firewood from the piers to the
steam-boats. What becomes of all these, and of the men and horses
toiling at the steam-row and tow-boats on the Oka, the Kama, the Don,
the Dnieper, and a hundred other rivers during the long season in
which the vast plains of Russia are turned into a howling wilderness
of snow and ice from end to end?

Railway communication and sledge-driving may, by doubling their
activity, afford employment to some of the men and beasts who would
otherwise be doomed to passive and torpid hybernation. But much of
the work that is practicable in other countries almost throughout
the year--nearly all that is done in the open air--suffers here
grievous interruption.

What should we think in England of a six months' winter, in which
the land were as hard as a rock, in which all the cattle had to
be kept within doors, in which the bricklayer's trowel and the
road-mender's roller had to be laid aside?

And, by way of compensation, what mere human bone and muscle can
stand the crushing labour by which the summer months, with their
long days of twenty hours' sunlight, must make up for the winter's
forced idleness; in a climate too, where, as far as my own experience
goes, the heat is hardly less oppressive and stifling than in the
level lands of Lombardy or the Emilia?

_ODESSA_

_ANTONIO GALLENGA_

From Yalta to Sebastopol there are two routes. One strikes across
the Yaila hills to Simpheropol, whence we could proceed by rail to
Sebastopol; the other runs along the coast, high up on the hills,
to the Baidar Gate and through the Baidar Valley leading to Balaclava
and the other well-known spots encompassing the ruins of what was
once the great naval station of the Russians on the Black Sea.

We chose the coast route, and travelled for five hours in the afternoon
over forty-eight versts of the most singular road in the world.

It rambles up and down along the side of the hills--as a road did
once on the beautiful Cornice along the Ligurian Riviera--midway
between the upper hill crest and the sea, having on the right the
mountains, a succession of wall-like, perpendicular, hoary