"Here is Balaklava," said the guide, as the carriage stopped at a turn in the road overlooking the valley.
Our friends stepped from the vehicle and sat down upon a little mound of earth, where they tried to picture the scene of the dreadful October day of 1854. Of the actors and spectators of that event very few are now alive.
The Doctor completed the recitation of the poem, and his youthful listeners felt down to the depths of their 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!
All the world wonder'd.
Honor the charge they made!
Honor the Light Brigade!
Noble six hundred!"
From the battle-field the party went to the village of Balaklava and hired a row-boat, in which they paddled about the little, landlocked harbor, and out through its entrance till they danced on the blue waters of the Euxine Sea. Frank and Fred could hardly believe that the narrow basin once contained a hundred and fifty English and French ships; it seemed that there was hardly room for a third of that number.
A BROKEN TARANTASSE.
On their return journey they passed a party with a broken tarantasse. They stopped a moment and offered any assistance in their power, but finding they could be of no use they did not tarry long. When they reached Sebastopol the sun had gone down in the west, and the stars twinkled in the clear sky that domed the Crimea. The next morning they rambled about the harbor and docks of the city, and a little past noon were steaming away in the direction of Odessa.
A day was spent in this prosperous city, which has a population of nearly two hundred thousand, on a spot where at the end of the last century there was only a Tartar village of a dozen houses, and a small fortress of Turkish construction. Odessa has an extensive commerce, and the ships of all nations lie at its wharves. Its greatest export trade is in wheat, which goes to all parts of the Mediterranean, and also to England. The Black Sea wheat formerly found a market in America, but all that has been changed in recent years through the development of the wheat-growing interest in our Western States and on the Pacific Coast.'