the impression had time to sink in. The northern half of it is perfectly flat, as flat as a table or a pancake, and is mostly all cultivated, being, indeed, as rich a bit of soil as there is in Europe. The corn had all been reaped when we passed, but even from the stubble one could partly judge how heavy the harvest had been, and where the plough was at work could admire the deep black friable loam which has gone on till now, and will go on for many a year to come, producing noble crops without the aid of manure. Further south the country rises into a great waving table-land, not unlike some parts of the Sussex downs or the moors of Western Yorkshire, traversed by long broad-backed ridges between which lie wide shallow hollows. Here, except in the river bottoms, the land is mostly untouched by culti vation, some of it roamed over by sheep and oxen, much of it altogether desolate, all of it open and unenclosed. It is fertile in the main, and would support a population almost as large again as that of Russia is now. Whatever Russia may want, she does not want land, and has no occasion to annex Bulgaria or Armenia, or any other country to provide an outlet for her superfluous children. No rock appears, except here and there a tiny chalk cliff, and farther south beds of sandstone and shale in the railway cuttings; no tree, except willows and poplars along the streams, and occasionally some bushes round one of the few villages that nestle in the hollows; no detached houses anywhere. Hour after hour the train journeys on through a silent wilderness of brown scorched grass

and withered weeds,1 climbing or descending in long sweeps the swelling downs, now catching sight of a herd of cattle in the distance, now caught by a dust. storm which the strong wind drives careering over the expanse, but with the same unchanging horizon all round, the same sense of motion without progress, which those who have crossed the ocean know so well. Even now, with a bright sun overhead, the dreariness and loneliness were almost terrible; what must they be in winter, when north-eastern gales howl over the waste of snow? Yet even in this dreariness there is a certain strange charm. Looking from one of these billowy ridge-tops across the vast expanse, with the wide blue sky vaulted over it, full of that intense luminous clearness which marks the East, glowing at sunrise and sunset with the richest hues, you come to feel that there is a beauty of the plain not less solemn and inspiring than that of the mountain.

Traversing this steppe for two whole days enables one to understand the kind of impression that Scythia made on the imagination of the Greeks: how all sorts of wonders and horrors, like those Herodotus relates, were credible about the peoples that roamed over these wilds; how terrible to their neighbours, how inaccessible and unconquerable themselves, they must have seemed to the natives of the sunny shores of the

1 The plants appeared, so far as one could make them out from the train, to be still mostly of British genera. There were several Polygonaceae and Labiatae, an Artemisia, a pretty purplish Statice, a small-flowered, much-branching Dianthus, and everywhere Achillaea millefolium, which seems to be the commonest of all weeds in Russia.

Ægean. One realizes also how emphatically this is the undefended side of Europe, the open space through which all the Asiatic hordes, Huns, Alans, Avars, Bulgarians, Mongols entered, their cavalry darting over the steppe in search of enemies or booty, their waggons following with their families and cattle, unchecked, except now and then by some great river, which, if it were too deep to ford, they crossed upon inflated skins. One understands what was the nature of the warfare that raged for so many centuries here between the Russians of Moscow and Kief, gradually pushing forward to the south and east, and the nomad tribes, whom they slowly subdued or dispossessed-Khazars, Polovtzi, Petchenegs, Komans, Tatars of various names, who were wont to scour across these plains on horseback plundering and burning every outlying settlement, and returning to the banks of the Volga or the Lower Don before the Russians had gathered to resist them. And turning from the past to the future, one speculates on the aspect which this vast and fertile territory will present a century or two hence when it has been all brought under cultivation, when populous towns will have arisen, when coal mines will have been opened, and yellow harvests be waving all over these now lonely downs. If Russia is then still Russia, a nation one in sentiment and faith, swayed by a single will, she will have become a tremendous power in the world. But, meantime, colonization goes on slowly; the future of the Russian government and people is out of all prediction, and Europe

itself may have changed in some way that would make our present calculations vain. One need not be too sanguine or too apprehensive of the future when it is remembered that about the future there is only one thing that can be positively asserted, to wit, that it will turn out not in the least like what the shrewdest observers expect. Of all the prophecies that philosophers or statesmen have made, from Aristotle to De Tocqueville, how many have come true? It is hard enough to say what ought to be done next year; and next century may surely be left to take care of itself. Moral and social causes are so much more powerful than physical ones, or, to speak more exactly, so often turn physical causes in an unexpected direction, that there is really no reason why an Englishman or a German should look on the material growth of Russia with alarm.

As one approaches the Sea of Azof, the steppe descends pretty steeply towards the south, and near the low ground forms some little cliffs which may perhaps be the origin of the name Konvo (the Crags) which Herodotus gives to the emporium of the Greek traders in Scythia, at the north-east corner of the Maeotis. Here, at the modern town of Rostof, the Don comes down, a broad muddy stream that dawdles along through a mesh of sandbanks to that wretched Sea of Azof which the ancients, considering its shallowness, and the fact that its water is almost quite fresh, more appropriately called a marsh. It is even shallower now than it was then, and grows shallower every year, not only by the action of the

Don pouring in mud, but also by that of the sea captains who sail up to Taganrog or Rostof for corn. Having no cargo to fetch with them, they mostly come "in ballast," and this ballast they fling overboard somewhere between the Straits of Kertch and Taganrog, thus forming shoals all along the track of navigation, on which the next comer runs aground. The government has threatened penalties on those who are detected, but detection is no easy matter. The trade from the Don is not only in corn, shipped here in vast quantities, but also in wine, which is pretty largely grown along the lower course of the stream, and is very tolerable drinking. It is consumed almost entirely by the Russians, who are especially fond of the effervescing sort which they call Don champagne. Nowhere in European Russia, except here and in the Crimea, some of whose wines. are excellent, does the grape seem to be regularly cultivated.

A dense haze filled the air as we crossed the Don, caused either by the dust-storms which the wind. raised, or by the smoke of steppe-fires, and cut off such view towards the sea as the flatness of the ground would have permitted. Soon we were again in the grassy wilderness, hundreds of miles wide, that lies between the Don and the Caucasus. Fires were blazing all over the steppe, whether accidental or lit for the sake of improving the pasture, I do not knowi the effect, at any rate, was extremely fine when night came on, though the grass was too short to give either the volume of blaze or the swift progress