CHAPTER V—THROUGH THE CRIMEA—IN AND AROUND SEVASTOPOL.
A Visit to the Crimea—The Porter with the Big Books—The Danger of Siberia—Our Entry into Sevastopol—Terrible Reminiscences of the Crimean War—How we shirked the Cemetery—The Great Dock-Yard of Sevastopol—We Visit a Remarkable Gunboat—What we saw Below-Deck—The Story that our Landlord Told—An Enterprising Tartar—The “Doubter” offers an opinion—How the “Judge” stole a Newspaper—Adventures by the Way—The “Doubter” gets into Trouble—We Fly to the Rescue—Eccentricities of a Selfish Man—We Rise and Depart.
WE went to Odessa, as I said, solely to escape the quarantine on entering Turkey. Being there—less than two hundred miles from Sevastopol—we could not resist the temptation to pay a flying visit to the Crimea.
We reached Odessa in the morning, and found that a steamer left at two o’clock in the afternoon for the ports of the Crimea, and as soon as we had passed the formalities of the Custom-House and the police—no trifling matters—we went to the steamer in question. And, by the way, they put us through very cautiously, and also very politely, when we entered the empire.
Three officers of the police, followed by a porter with an armful of big books, came on board the Metternich, the steamer from Galatz, as soon as she entered the port. They took seats at the cabin table, spread out the passports which had been collected by the purser of the steamer, and then began work.
They disposed of two or three persons, and then came to my case.
“Have you ever been in Russia before?” said one of the officials in French. "Yes,” I answered.
“When was the last time?”
“In 1867.”
“Where were you?” and he looked at me very attentively.
“In a great many places,” I answered. “In Moscow, Petersburg, Warsaw, Kazan, and in Eastern and Western Siberia.
“Ah, you have been in Siberia!” said the official, and he and the others pricked up their ears.
“Nous verrons,” he continued, and he picked up one of the big books and turned to the initial of my name. “Possibly I may have to report your arrival at once,” he remarked, as he scanned page after page of the volume.
When he had finished that, he went for another, and altogether he looked through four or five books.
“There is nothing against you,” he said, as he finished the examination, and, with a smile worthy of a diplomate of the highest rank, he signed my passport and handed it over, with the wish that I might enjoy my trip to the Crimea, and have bon voyage partout, and he was kind enough to attend next to the passports of my companions, as we had no time to spare in getting to the Crimean steamer.
“The Russian Company of Navigation and Commerce,” to which I entrusted myself for the journey to Sevastopol—they call it Sev-as-to-pol there—is a big concern. It has eighty-four steamers, varying all the way from one hundred to thirty-six hundred tons each; nine of them are of the largest class of ocean steamers, and two-thirds of the rest are none of them less than nine hundred tuns. The large steamers run from Odessa to London, to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, to the Red Sea, and the ports of the Indian Ocean. The other steamers navigate the Black Sea and the adjacent waters, including several rivers that flow into that sea and the sea of Azof. I expected to find their boats dirty and badly managed; on the contrary, I found them clean and comfortable, with good service in the cabin and good management on deck.
The advertised time of the Crimea boat to leave Odessa is two o’clock in the afternoon, and it was not more than five minutes past two when our lines were cast off. I am told that the time table of the company is strictly kept, except of course, in case of unforseen accident.
The company was organized after the Crimean war, and has developed a great business. The repair-shops are at Sevastopol, but very little building is done there. All or nearly all the large steamers were built in England. The officers are generally appointed from the navy, and their pay is higher than in the regular service. On one of the steamers I encountered an officer, whose acquaintance I had made in the Okhotsk Sea several years before. “I am out of the government employ,” he said, “having served my full term. I am commanding one of this company’s largest steamers now; the service is harder, but I get much better pay than my rank in the navy would bring me.”
The steamer carried us along toward Eupatoria, and I was up when we steamed into the bay, where the English made their first descent upon the Crimea. There are no docks or piers; nothing but a semi-circular beach, like a bit of yellow lace on the end of a sleeve to a lady’s dress, and an irregular double fringe of houses beyond it. Ships anchor in the bay, and are unloaded by lighters. Our passengers were taken ashore in boats, and the freight and baggage were unceremoniously dumped into a huge launch. Heavy boxes and barrels were placed atop of trunks and valises, and there was a general mess of things.
It was at Eupatoria, on Thursday, September 14th, 1854, that the allied army landed in the Crimea. The place, the day, and the occasion will remain for ever memorable in French, English, and Russian history. Fifty thousand soldiers of the allied army were that day landed on Russian soil; of that fifty thousand nearly all are now in their last sleep. They perished in the battles of the Alma, the Tchernaya, and Inkermann; they fell in the trenches during the siege of Sevastopol; or worn out with privation and exposure, or suffering from wounds and disease, crept on board the transports at Balaklava and were borne away to die in the hospitals of Scutari or in their own native lands. In one year from that memorable landing at Eupatoria the fifty thousand had become ten thousand; and when the bugles sang truce and the flag of peace fluttered over the shattered walls and smoking ruins of Sevastopol, there was scarce a vestige remaining of the Grand Army of the Orient, that had sailed so proudly from the shores of France and England and assembled on Turkish soil to prepare for the descent into the Crimea. Death spared neither rank nor condition. Of all the officers and soldiers whose hearts beat high on that day as they saw the tri-color and the red cross waving over the gravelly beach at Eupatoria, very few are now alive.
There had been a fog in the morning, and occasional spittings and spatterings of rain, but it cleared up soon after we left Eupatoria, and the coast of the Crimea, with serrated mountains cutting the sky, and with steppes of sand and white rock here and there, came out clear and distinct beyond the dark waters of the Euxine Sea. Gloriously bright was the sun when a Russian officer pointed to a distant promontory and told me that there was Sevastopol; and deep blue was the sky, with not a patch of cloud to mar it, when we headed our prow toward Fort Constantine, and pushed steadily and fearlessly into the port which so long resisted the assaults of the allied armies of England and France. Away to the left lay the valley of the Alma, and also on our left, but nearer to us, the Inkermann pyramid was visible to mark the field of Inkermann’s battle. White specks of marble near the pyramid marked the resting-place of England’s gallant dead, and not far distant was the cemetery where lay the soldiers who fell there for the glory of France. In front, beyond the harbor, was the tawny mound of the Malakoff, with ugly seams and ridges over all its surface; beyond it were the Redan and the Mamelon Vert, and away to the right was the famous Bastion du Mat. The white walls of the marine barracks and arsenal filled much of the centre of the picture, far too much for Russian eyes, when it is remembered that they were the walls of ruins.
Forts Constantine and Nicholas are passed; no gun speaks from their walls, and not a soldier is visible to note our entrance. The shattered and ruined walls of these forts have disappeared; the present fortresses are new, or at any rate they have undergone a vast amount of repairing since the day the allies left Sevastopol after their work of destruction was finished.
We steamed up to the stone pier, where a dense crowd was gathered to meet us—in the foreground the officials of the port, behind them the well-dressed part of the community, and further away the wide-mouthed and sheepskin-coated peasantry of Russia. Our guide-book had told us of a good hotel a couple of hundred yards from the landing, and as soon as we could get ashore we went to it at a respectable pace. A crowd of hack-men sought to entrap us into riding, but we disdained their offers. We found the hotel, and after selecting rooms and fixing the price, we proceeded to “do” Sevastopol.
“Get us a guide at once and a carriage for three,” I said to the German-Russian landlord, who spoke English, French, or any other language that you might choose to try him in.
He sent a messenger to bring what we wanted and then asked where we wished to go.
I told him we wished to see all that we could that afternoon, and leave in the morning for Yalta. He mentioned the Malakoff, Redan, Inkermann, and other points, including the cemetery, and I interrupted him with:
“Never mind the cemetery; send us somewhere else.”
“Oh, then you are Americans,” he exclaimed; “every Englishman goes at once to the cemetery, and it is the first thing he asks for; but an American always says: “D——n the cemetery; take me somewhere else.’”
A moment later he apologized for his intimation that my countrymen were universally profane; but reiterated his assertion that every Englishman visiting Sevastopol goes at once to the cemetery, while every American prefers to do something else. I can well understand this. So many English were buried there, that every British visitor is sure to have occasion to look after the grave of a relative or friend; or, at all events, he has been requested to look out the burial-place of somebody and report its condition. Few Americans are likely to have anything more than ordinary curiosity to attract them to the cemetery at Sevastopol.
In a little while the carriage and guide were ready, and we started. The guide was a Greek—he may have been a Greek brigand—who had not been long in Sevastopol, and didn’t know enough about the place to hurt himself to any alarming extent. He spoke English fairly, but not over elegantly, and was, on the whole, satisfactory.
We drove off along the street leading upward from the hotel, and in the direction of the Malakoff and other fortresses of the days of the war. We were soon on the edge of the bluff overlooking the southern harbor, and could gaze down almost perpendicularly on the ships at anchor there. As we looked toward the end of the harbor, we discovered just beyond it a new building, and I asked what it was.
“That is the railway station,” was the guide’s reply. “The government is building a railway from Sevastopol to connect with the line from the Sea of Azof to Moscow and St. Petersburg. They have surveyed all the line, and a good deal of it is finished. They are going to lay the track all round this harbor, so that ships can be loaded right from the trains and the trains from the ships.”
I looked and saw the grading ready for the rails on both sides of the harbor and sweeping round the hill-side toward Inkermann.
Had this railway existed twenty years ago the allies would have failed to capture Sevastopol. It was their primitive mode of transportation more than anything else that caused Russia’s defeat. She learned then the importance of railways, and has since been putting her knowledge into practice.
We climbed to the top of the Malakoff, where a single Russian soldier holds peaceful possession of what thousands were once unable to defend. From the summit of the casemate we looked over the field, traced the lines of the contending armies, and then turned toward Inkermann and the defenses in that direction. The ground all round is cut and torn with rifle-pits, trenches, approaches, and defenses, and is a picture of desolation. Sevastopol is a mass of ruins; its inhabited dwellings are not a tenth the number of the fallen or falling walls, and you can ride or walk through whole squares of what were once rows of handsome edifices, but are now nothing but heaps of stones. It is more like Pompeii than any modern city I have ever seen.
Sevastopol must have been beautiful twenty years ago; she is the reverse of beautiful now, and I do not wonder that the Russian who walks through her half silent and almost deserted streets vows with compressed lips and lowering brow that Sevastopol must be avenged. She is majestic in her ruins. One feels her greatness, or what it must have been, at every step he takes; and no one can call Russia a barbarous nation when he looks at the remains of her dockyards, which were her pride and glory. To destroy these docks required months of labor on the part of French and English engineers. What must have been the labor to create them!
There had been much talk about a new kind of gunboat then at Sevastopol, and by the kindness of Admiral Popoff, the inventor of the system, I was permitted to visit and examine the Novgorod, as the pioneer vessel is called. She was built at Nicolayeff, on the River Bug, and was brought to Sevastopol to be finished. Another boat of the same class, but larger, to be called the Popofka was under construction, and intended to be followed by several others. The Novgorod is something like our monitors, though with a difference. When the original Monitor came out we were told to imagine a cheese-box on a raft; in the present instance you may imagine a cheese-box without any raft. The Novgorod is circular, and about a hundred feet in diameter; her sides where they rise above the water are perpendicular, but they do not rise very high—not more than a couple of feet. From the edge toward the centre there is a gentle incline, and this incline is covered with small cleats of wood to enable one to preserve his foothold. About twenty-five feet from the edge there is a circular wall of iron, fifteen inches thick, forming a turret like that of one of our monitors. This turret is fixed and made as firm as possible; inside of it is a movable turret, containing the guns, and pierced with two holes, through which the guns are to be discharged. The turret is firmly fastened to the platform which sustains the guns, and it can be raised or lowered at will by means of machinery. The guns are eleven-inch breech-loaders, and are very well finished; the carriages are of an improved pattern, and altogether the turret and its contents are highly creditable to their designers and makers.
Workmen were busy both in and out of the boat, and there was an unsatisfactory lot of fresh paint on nearly everything, so that it was necessary to be cautious in one’s movements.
In spite of all my attention I found myself somewhat soiled at the end of my journey, and on returning to the hotel I underwent a vigorous application of turpentine. Like our monitors, the Novgorod is not abundantly supplied with internal space for machinery, coal, ammunition, stores, and crew, though there is more of it than one might at first suppose. Her circular shape gives her an advantage in this respect, and it is really surprising how much room you find where you expect so little.
As you descend into the engine room—her engines were made by Bird of St. Petersburg—you find the machinery stowed so compactly and everywhere around you, that you begin to think she is all machinery inside like a watch, but when you are taken thence into the places where coal and provisions are stored, you change your mind. The quarters for the crew are cramped, as; in all ships of war, and occupy about the same space relative to the officers’ quarters as on our monitors. The captain’s room is quite spacious and neatly finished and furnished, and the other officers have nothing to complain of. In the captain’s room was a model of the boat, and I studied it attentively to ascertain the shape of the craft below the water line. The boat does not preserve its circular form all the way down, or rather I should say that the circular form is maintained above the water and an elongated one below.
Take an apple and cut the lower two-thirds of it so as to give it the general shape of a ship below the water line, and you have the idea of the general external shape of the Novgorod. She has a bow and stern like any other ship, but neither of them is very sharp. If you look for fine lines like those of a clipper sailer or of a fast steamship, you will be disappointed, as the Novgorod is not designed for speed, nor as a general thing, for attack. They claim that she can steam nine knots an hour, but her steaming qualities have never been fairly tested. She is intended for coast and harbor defence, and is made of light draft, ten or twelve feet, so that she can lie out of the reach of deep-draft ships. She has six screws, three on each side of her rudder, and by working the triplets in opposite directions she can be turned in her own length, or rather in her own diameter. The space below deck is lighted by means of a grated flooring inside the turret, by openings in the deck. Hatchways at several points permit of ingress and egress, and are so arranged that they can be closed whenever necessary.
So much for the general description of the boat. Now we come to the fighting business. When her coal and stores are all on board, she will be sunk within a couple of feet of the water—that is to say, the perpendicular side of the boat will rise about two feet above the surface. In this condition she can steam to her destination under about the same conditions of safety as those attending our monitors. Looked at from a distance she will appear like a tea-saucer, on an enormous scale, turned bottom upward, and having an old fashioned pill-box in the centre. In ordinary times she has a pair of smoke-stacks, one on each side of her turret, but these are made telescopic and will be lowered out of sight when she goes into action. Then she has ventilators which also disappear, and she has a temporary steering house on deck that disappears likewise. In action she is steered from the inside in accordance with signals given by an officer in a reasonably secure little lookout box in front of the turret. In fact, all the deck apparatus except the turret, is made to disappear entirely in time of battle, and the gunboat is as plain as the wardrobe of a country clergyman on a small salary which is not promptly paid.
Nothing is visible when the boat goes into battle but the sloping deck and the turret above it. Indeed there is not much of the deck visible, as the boat takes in water enough to sink her down, so that all the perpendicular side and some of her sloping portion is below the surface. The fixed turret stands up in the centre, and inside of it is the movable turret containing the guns. This is kept lowered until the moment for firing; then the machinery turns it round in the required direction, and raises it so that the holes for the muzzles of the guns come above the edge of the fixed turret. The guns are run out till their muzzles are even with the outside of the port-holes, and when the proper aim is obtained, they are fired and instantly lowered, or they may be kept in place and reloaded, according to the will of the commander. They are handled, so to speak, by machinery, a couple of rods in the hands of their captain performing all the work of aiming, one rod serving to raise and depress their muzzles, and another to move the turret horizontally.
Steam has been brought into satisfactory subjection in the Novgorod. The turret is controlled and the guns are operated by steam; steam propels the boat, and may be made to steer it. Very little hand labor is required, and the boat may carry fewer men than other war-ships of her capacity. She is built throughout in the strongest manner, and her constructors are very proud of her.
For harbor and coast defence they claim great advantages over the old style of war ships, and I was told that it was the intention of the government to build a considerable number of ships of the Novgorod pattern. They were to be stationed at the ports of the Black Sea, and along the Baltic, and it was thought they could made things lively for a blockading squadron. The Novgorod was of a hundred and the Popofka a hundred and twenty-five feet diameter; whether the others would be of greater or less size I am unable to say. Other ships of war are to be constructed on the Black sea, and in course of time the Russians hope to bring their Black Sea fleet up to something like its old standard. The arsenal at Sevastopol is theoretically the property of the Russian Company of Navigation and Commerce, and contains their repair shops, but practically it is the property of the government, and will be more and more so as time rolls on.
We spent the evening in the hotel and on the cliff overlooking the harbor, and tried to imagine the scenes of twenty years ago.
“The rocket’s red glare and bombs bursting in air” have ceased over Sevastopol—let us hope for ever—and all was calm as though the spot had never known the horrors of war. The loquacious landlord told us many stories of the siege, and of the fortunes of Sevastopol before and since the war. “Now we are to have better times,” he said; “the railway will be completed next year, and we shall then have a line of steamers direct to Constantinople. Capitalists are coming here to start business, and we shall hope for commercial activity. The government has determined that Sevastopol shall rise again, and we feel sure that it will rise.”
Before the war the city had little short of thirty thousand inhabitants. Now it has about five thousand, but the number is slowly increasing. With a revival of business and a restoration of the naval dockyard, Sevastopol will resume its old activity and importance and become again the mistress of the Euxine. Her harbor is one of the finest in the world, and her geographical position renders it of great value.
The landlord escorted me to my room, and as he set the dripping and guttering candle on a rickety table, his loquacity continued:
“This,” said he, “is the room that was occupied by Kinglake, when he came here to study the siege of Sevastopol. He was a good fellow, and, when he left, he gave my daughter a new sovereign and she has kept it ever since. Of course you have read his history of the war? Many officers who come here say he has made some mistakes, but no man can be expected to get everything right.”
I went to sleep and dreamed of assaults on the Malakoff and Redan, and of the morning when the grey regiments which were Russia’s pride and glory burst through the pall of fog, and fell upon the unexpecting allies in their camp at Inkermann. Clash of steel, roll of musketry, and the diapason of artillery resounded through the night and made my slumber unrefreshing. I recalled the time when the whole civilized world turned its eyes upon the Crimea, and with what an electric thrill was received the announcement “Sevastopol has fallen!” And here in the city, where for many months the sounds of war were heard almost without cessation, all was now the stillness of a long peace. Waking, I could hardly realize that I was in Sevastopol. Sleeping, I lived again in the midst of the strife, and participated in the exciting events that have found a place in history.
In the morning we set out for Yalta in a carriage which we hired of an enterprising Tartar who demanded his pay in advance. He demanded and we refused, and the more he wanted his money on the spot the more he didn’t get it.
In a discussion between Capital and Labor the former generally has the best of it, and the result of our discussion proved no exception to the rule. Labor was compelled to accept our terms and receive its pay when the work was done, but it required a good half-hour to bring Labor to terms. We were entrusted to the care of a good natured but rather stupid driver, and to three horses harnessed abreast and full of energy. We trotted out of the ruin-lined streets, and soon left out of sight the most famous city of southern Russia.
The day was beautiful—a sort of a hazy Indian-summer sky—and if we had ordered the weather to suit us it could not have been more delightful. We drove through the field of Balaklava. How few there are now living of those who made Balaklava famous?
We made a brief halt at the edge of the plain where the immortal Light Brigade rode to glory and the grave, and pressed unflinchingly forward as the pitiless iron from Russian batteries tore through their ranks, and covered the ground with dead and dying heroes. One of our party recited Tennyson’s well-known poem on this event, and I think we all felt, down to the depths of our hearts, the full force of the closing lines:
“Honor the brave and bold;
Long shall the tale be told,
Yea, when our babes are old,
How they rode onward.
When can their glory fade?
O! the wild charge they made,
Honor the Light Brigade,
Noble Six Hundred!”
We visited the little village of Balaklava, and in a Russian rowboat paddled in the miniature land-locked harbor and out to its entrance, where we danced on the waves that rolled inward from the sea. Then we drove to Baidar, a miserable village, where we supped on tea, eggs, and bread, and breakfasted on eggs, bread, and tea—nothing else—and slept on beds of the most impromptu character. I covered myself with my overcoat and travelling shawl, the Judge solaced himself with a table-cloth and a fish-net, while the “Doubter” was kept warm by a late copy of the London Times in addition to his overcoat. It was a rough night, and we were off early in the morning, as, indeed, anybody would be with such accommodations. If you want to get a man up in good season, put him to sleep on a pile of rocks, or a bed that dates from the Silurian period, with the chief qualities of roughness and solidity.
The “Doubter” averred his belief that there was not so bad a hotel in all Russia as the one he occupied in Baidar; and ever afterwards when we wished to get him into a regular cast-iron passion we had only to refer to his night’s lodging in the interior of the Crimea. And I really think that he was unfairly treated, as the Judge afterward made confession of having taken away the full sheet of the Times soon after they retired, thus leaving the “Doubter” nothing but “the supplement.”
An hour after leaving Baidar we passed through a stone gateway, and came out upon the sea. Or, rather, we came out upon the edge of a mountain, and looked down more than a thousand feet upon the waters kissed by the rising sun, and broken into little billows just touched with crests of foam by a gentle breeze from the east. Away on the horizon and below our line of sight lay a stratum of white clouds, and in the far distance to the left the wind and sun were chasing away the remains of the darkness of the November night, and near at hand on the right and left lay the mountains with great, rugged tops, round which half a dozen eagles were whirling and occasionally disappearing in the floating masses of light clouds. Down below, toward the upper; part of the peninsula, the mountains sloped away but so slightly as to make us wonder how we would find a passage among them.
I have become familiar with a good deal of scenery in the past twenty years, but I know few things that can surpass this first view of the sea on the road from Sevastopol to Yalta. The scene bursts suddenly upon you. At one minute you are among the hills and forests and sparsely scattered fields, where you have been travelling ever since you left Balaklava, and you are voting the whole thing a trifle monotonous. You pass through the gateway, which is arched and bastioned like a small fortress, and what a change in the picture! You are in a narrow road, with scarcely sufficient standing place for the carriage and horses; the crag at your left seems ready to topple over and cover you, and as you look up a thousand or twelve hundred feet along its gray sides, you perceive deep and irregular fissures in which, here and there, trees are clinging quite safe from the woodman’s axe, and forming a secure resting for the eagles that circle about them. Their prevailing grey color is diversified by the tints peculiar to volcanic rocks everywhere, and they cut the sky with a sharp and jagged outline whose every angle is rendered more distinct by the great elevation to which the mountains rise above you. This mountain-chain stretches about thirty miles along the coast; it stands bold and upright from the sea above Balaklava, but gradually trends away from the water until, at Yalta, it is more than five miles distant.
Here, at the Baidar-gate, the strip of land is nearly a mile wide, but as you look down the dizzy distance you could solemnly aver that the width is not more than a hundred yards. The strip of land shelves rapidly, and is dotted with patches of forest, rough boulders, and the general debris of the mountain-chain, and stippled and streaked with little rivulets that trickle onward toward the sea. There are sharp ridges and deep ravines, barren patches and woody dells; the whole forming a favorite resort of the game-birds and the beasts that make this region an attractive one for the hunter.
Here and there you see a house nestling and crouching in a lovely valley, and as you proceed on your way you find the houses and villas becoming every hour more and more numerous. The high cliffs shelter the land from northerly winds, and as the sun pours full and strong over the sea, a climate of peculiar warmth is developed that gives this part of the Crimea a fertility of almost tropical luxuriance. The productions of this region are of wonderful variety and excellence.
We whirled down and along the front of the mountains, hour after hour, and with new combinations of land and ocean constantly presented to our eyes. We halted at Alupka, where is the palace of Prince Woronzoff, and at the hotel we had a comfortable meal, which our morning ride had prepared us to enjoy. We washed it down with the excellent wine of the Crimea, bearing the Woronzoff brand, and grown in the vineyards that dot all the hill-sides in the last dozen miles of our drive. After a two hours’ halt we were on the road again, and passing the palace of Livadia, the summer residence of the Emperor, and one of the prettiest spots in the world, we reached Yalta an hour before sunset, having made one of the most delightful rides that can fall to the lot of the traveller.
Yalta is the Long Branch or Newport of Southern Russia, and many persons go there to spend the summer and autumn. The situation is charming and the climate delicious; the Emperor has a palace close at hand, and as he spends every autumn there, it is no wonder that Yalta has become fashionable. The principal street along the sea-shore has a fringe of hotels, and so great was the rush at the time of our visit, that there was a difficulty in obtaining rooms. Prices were high, and from a contemplation of the bill of fare, I should think the hotel-keepers were anxious to make a fortune in a short time and retire from business.
Picturesque Russians and Crim-Tartars wander through the streets, making a marked contrast to the fashionables from Odessa and Moscow. In the market the “Doubter” got into trouble by handling and tasting some fruit, and was compelled to buy it in order to get out of the scrape.
He had an inordinate passion for handling everything (except his own money when bills were to be paid) and this propensity served sometimes to increase our annoyances, and occasionally our expenses. At a church in Odessa he broke a part of the fixtures on the altar because he insisted upon picking them up, and he only escaped trouble by pretending not to understand what was said to him. He didn’t rely much on his senses of hearing and seeing, but when it came to smelling, tasting, and feeling—particularly the latter—he was on hand. He wasn’t satisfied with seeing a picture but he must feel it and smell it, and not till then did he believe in its existence. The same was the case with nearly everything else that could be touched; and when he saw things in a show-case he wanted them opened for his amusement and manipulation. During his journey in the East he felt nearly everything within his reach, except an impulse of generosity, and with that he had no desire to become acquainted.
We rose early in Yalta, and were off for Odessa, where we arrived without accident or delay.
