ravellers apprehensive of possible
suffering on their road to Odessa, their intended winter-quarters,
whence they were distant about 900 versts.

It was indeed the worst season for travelling in Russia. Travellers have
good reason to fear the first snows, which, as they are not firm enough
to bear a sledge, are almost every year the cause of many accidents. The
winds, too, at this season are excessively violent, and raise the drifts
in terrific whirling snow-storms, which threaten the destruction of the
traveller. Madame de Hell and her husband, however, accomplished their
journey in safety, though not without enduring considerable pain and
anxiety. Nothing can be more awful than the snowy wastes they were
compelled to traverse, swept and ravaged as they were by furious blasts.
All trace of man's existence--all trace of human labour--is buried
beneath the great cold white billows, which lie heaped upon one another,
like breakers on a stormy coast.

* * * * *

Madame de Hell and her husband spent the winter at Odessa; and in the
following May departed on a visit to the Crimea, on board a brig
belonging to the consul of the Netherlands. Their voyage was short, but
it was not unmarked by incident, by sea-sickness and sudden squalls, by
calm moonlit nights, by something of all the pain and pleasure of the
sea. At sunrise on the second morning, the voyagers first caught sight
of the coast of that gloomy peninsula which the ancients stigmatized as
inhospitable, in allusion to the cruel custom of its inhabitants to
massacre every stranger whose ill-fortune led him thither. The woes of
Orestes, as depicted by the Greek poet, have for ever made the Tauris
famous. Who does not remember the painful beauty of that grand sad
drama, in which the vengeful cries of the Furies seem to echo along this
wild and desert shore? As soon as Madame de Hell could distinguish the
line of rocks that traced the vague horizon, she began to look for Cape
Parthenike, the traditional site of the altar of the goddess, to whom
the young priestess Iphigenia was on the point of sacrificing her
brother. Assisted by the captain, she at length descried on a rocky
headland a solitary chapel, dedicated, she was told, to the Virgin
Mother. "What a contrast," she naturally remarks, "between the gentle
worship of Mary and that of the sanguinary Taura, who was not content
with the mariners' prayers and offerings, but demanded human