“There is nothing to see here, and you had better not stop.”
“But,” we insisted, becoming a little weary of his obstinate and stupid repetitions, “we can’t possibly go on until the wind moderates, and, furthermore, we don’t propose to try. Here are our passports, viséed by the representative of his Imperial Majesty, the Czar.”
The sight of two large documents, quite unlike anything called passports he had ever before seen, only added to his distress, and he looked at them with much the expression of a man who sees the warrant for his arrest in the hands of a sheriff. At this juncture two young men came up, introduced themselves to us as fish merchants of the place, interceded in our behalf, and succeeded in calming the old man’s excitement so that he looked at the visés on our passports and told us to come ashore. After further discussion he consented to register and stamp our papers, but refused to give them back to us, saying we could have them again when we went away. All the arguments we could invent were eloquently used in the hope of persuading him to permit us to land our sketching materials, and our two young allies, who had been educated in Odessa and understood our position, joined their voices to ours, but all in vain. Not an article must be removed from the canoes—not even
FISHING STATION ON THE BLACK SEA
a sketch-book—and, furthermore, we must promise not to sketch anything before we would be allowed to go into the village. Seeing the place even with this restriction was better than dangling our heels from the edge of the quay all the afternoon, and we accepted the invitation of one of the fish merchants to drink tea with him, and strolled off into the village.
The houses are low and solidly built, and most of them have one peculiar feature—a row of columns in front, supporting a projection of the roof. They stand closely together along straight thoroughfares which are little better than canals of mud, being only a few inches above the level of the river. The foundations of the houses are raised a foot or two above these sloughs, and roughly-hewn plank sidewalks, supported by piles, extend everywhere in front of the buildings, even into the narrow side alleys where fishermen’s huts are huddled together in the marsh among reeds and willows. Two great white churches, enclosed by neat palings, occupy the middle of wide, neglected squares, and look bleak and bare and uninviting. The house we visited was of one story, but long and deep, and was comfortably, even luxuriously, furnished. The drawing-room, where we took unlimited tea and sweets, after the Russian custom, might have been in Vienna or Bucharest, with its parquet floor and ornate furniture.