victims!"

All this part of the coast is barren and bleak; a barrier of rock seems
to shut out the stranger from the celebrated peninsula which warlike
nations have ravaged and commercial nations coveted. Richly gifted by
Nature's liberal hand, it has always been an object of desire to the
people of Europe and Asia. Pastoral races have lusted after its green
mountain ranges; commercial nations have striven to gain possession of
its ports and straits; warrior tribes have pitched their tents in its
fertile valleys; and all have craved a foothold in that land to which
cling so many glorious memories of the Greek civilization. But in the
eighteenth century the contention came to an end, at least so far as
political observers can determine, for ages, and under the rule of the
Russian Czar, the Crimea has long enjoyed a profound tranquillity.[6]

"So that," as Mr. Kinglake puts it, "the peninsula which divides the
Euxine from the Sea of Azov was an almost forgotten land, lying out of
the chief paths of merchants and travellers, and far away from all the
capital cities of Christendom. Rarely went thither any one from Paris,
or Vienna, or Berlin; to reach it from London was a harder task than to
cross the Atlantic; and a man of office receiving in this distant
province his orders despatched from St. Petersburg, was the servant of
masters who governed him from a distance of a thousand miles.

"Along the course of the little rivers which seamed the ground, there
were villages and narrow belts of tilled land, with gardens and fruitful
vineyards; but for the most part this neglected Crim-Tartary was a
wilderness of steppe or of mountain-range, much clothed towards the west
with tall stiff grasses, and the stems of a fragrant herb like
southernwood. The bulk of the people were of Tartar descent, but no
longer what they had been in the days when nations trembled at the
coming of the Golden Horde; and although they yet hold to the Moslem
faith, their religion has lost its warlike fire. Blessed with a
dispensation from military service, and far away from the accustomed
battle-fields of Europe and Asia, they lived in quiet, knowing little
of war except what tradition could faintly carry down from old times in
low monotonous chants. In their husbandry they were more governed by the
habits of their ancestors than by the nature of the land which had once
fed the people of Athens, for they neglected tillage and clung to
pastoral life. Wat