Like aU inhabitants of great cities, the people of Odessa seek to escape from it to the country in the blooming season of the year, and enjoy, as well as they can, the pleasm'es of a rui'al life, even on their inliospitable steppes, where nature seems continually to oppose their plans. I -visited several of these coimtry seats, or ^^ khutors,'^ as they are called, (why I could never make out, for the word is neither Russian or Italian), on which their owners had expended hundreds and thousands, though there was scarcely a tree or a shrub to be seen ; and it is no easy matter to lay out even a small garden on this flat, arid soU, destitute of springs, exposed in summer to a scorching heat, and in winter to a rough hyperborean north wind. When these difficulties have been in some measure overcome, however, it must be owned, these Httle flowery oases are verjdeUghtftil after the immeasurable waste of the steppe, or the dusty streets of Odessa, and the busy merchant does well to spend what he can afford in providing such an agi-eeable reti-eat for his summer evenings. The pleasure of these things can never be measured by their absolute value, and there is no doubt the simple little khutor affbrds as much satisfaction to its possessoi as the most magnificent Roman viUa. I recollect an Odessa merchant who exhibited to me, vath. the greatest pride and delight, a birch-tree in his garden, which he assured me was the largest in all Odessa, and consequently for a hundred and sixty miles romid. It was fifteen feet high, and so thick that at the bottom one could scarcely span it with four fingers. Ilia joy m this rare specimen of arboricultmv, was already checked, however by an.xiety lest it should soon begin to languish and die. The tree which prospers most, and is, therefore, most frequently seen, is the acacia ; among flowers it is the dahlia that thrives with the greatest luxm-iance.
A few of these khutors have what might almost be called a romantic situation, where the high precipitous bank looking over the Black Seas has, in some measure fallen in, forming, what the Russians call the obruivi. The abrupt fall of the edge of the steppe which has formed these obruivi, occm-s all along the coast from the mouth of the Dnieper to that of the Danube. This is sometimes occasioned by the waves dashing agamst and wearing away the lower part of the bank, but more frequently by the action of springs beneath the upper strata of the steppe, and even below the level of the sea. Hollow places are thus formed, into which large portions of the ground sink down, occasionally as much as from ten to twelve fathoms of perpendicular depth.
I visited a piece of land which had sunk in this way a few months before, and where all the consequences were still distinctly visible. The terrace of the steppe at this place was about twenty-five or tliirty fathoms high, and the piece of land had fallen about ten, but continued in a perfectly horizontal position. The sinking mass had raised the sea-shore as much as fifteen or twenty feet, so that the httle shells and pebbles that before had been rolled backwards and forwards by the waves, now lay high and dry on an eminence, at whose foot the surf was breaking. Trees which had grown on this piece of land; in the gardens, were overthrown or buried, parts of the gardens entirely destroyed and covered with masses of earth and chalk, and the foundations of two houses had suffered so much that the houses themselves had fallen in. The people in the neighbourhood related, that in the night, when the fall took place, they had been terrified by the perpetual thundering and cracking of the ground, and that the floors of their houses had rocked as dming an earthquake.
I have seen some other spots where the sinking mass had raised little islands from the bottom of the sea, and as these falls have happened at various times one behind another on the coast, there have been formed between the steppe and the sea a series of terraces that have been gradually rounded off" and covered with gTass, so as to form a little miniature imitation of mountain scenery between the two monotonous surfaces of water and grass. Here a Httle elegant colony of khutors has been planted ; and as the trees and flowers have much more protection than on the high steppe, they flourish much better. These khutors, of wliich, however, there are only six, are far superior to any of the other villas around Odessa, and accordingly it was in one of these that the empress resided while the emperor was besieging Varna.