nce we three or four fortunate ones made the midnight trip to
Athens, it has afforded him genuine satisfaction to give every body in
the ship a pebble from the Mars-hill where St. Paul preached. He got all
those pebbles on the sea shore, abreast the ship, but professes to have
gathered them from one of our party. However, it is not of any use for
me to expose the deception--it affords him pleasure, and does no harm to
any body. He says he never expects to run out of mementoes of St. Paul
as long as he is in reach of a sand-bank. Well, he is no worse than
others. I notice that all travelers supply deficiencies in their
collections in the same way. I shall never have any confidence in such
things again while I live.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

We have got so far east, now--a hundred and fifty-five degrees of
longitude from San Francisco--that my watch can not "keep the hang" of
the time any more. It has grown discouraged, and stopped. I think it
did a wise thing. The difference in time between Sebastopol and the
Pacific coast is enormous. When it is six o'clock in the morning here,
it is somewhere about week before last in California. We are excusable
for getting a little tangled as to time. These distractions and
distresses about the time have worried me so much that I was afraid my
mind was so much affected that I never would have any appreciation of
time again; but when I noticed how handy I was yet about comprehending
when it was dinner-time, a blessed tranquillity settled down upon me, and
I am tortured with doubts and fears no more.

Odessa is about twenty hours' run from Sebastopol, and is the most
northerly port in the Black Sea. We came here to get coal, principally.
The city has a population of one hundred and thirty-three thousand, and
is growing faster than any other small city out of America. It is a free
port, and is the great grain mart of this particular part of the world.
Its roadstead is full of ships. Engineers are at work, now, turning the
open roadstead into a spacious artificial harbor. It is to be almost
inclosed by massive stone piers, one of which will extend into the sea
over three thousand feet in a straight line.

I have not felt so much at home for a long time as I did when I "raised
the hill" and stood in Odessa for the first time. It looked just like an
American city; fine, broad streets, and straight as well; low houses,
(two or three stories,) wide, neat, and free from any q