The cucumbers grown in these gardens are also very abundant, and play a far more important part in Russian housekeeping than they do in ours. They are often served with roast meat, without any other vegetable, and in travelling I have sometimes been compelled to put up with cold cucumbers, by way of refreshment, at midnight, the larder of the inn containing nothing else. It is not uncommon, when the Russians quarrel with the Greeks, to hear them call them " Grass-green Greeks," in allusion to their custom of eating many vegetables raw ; but I cannot help thinking the term more applicable to themselves. Women and girls of all classes will often, while walking in a garden, pluck a cucumber, and proceed to eat it without any dressing.
The most distinguished ornament of the bashtan is the sunflower, whose golden splendour enables one to recognise them afar off. They are not, however, employed merely as decorations, for^ as the people of this country are fond of keeping their teeth in practice, and are scarcely ever without some kind of nut or kernel in their mouths, wliich they chew in the interval of their rneals, the seeds of the sunflower have been brought into requisition for this purpose.
The particular sympathy wliich every German must feel in the welfare of his countrymen in a foreign land, and the general interest awakened for the German colonies in Russia in the minds of all thinking persons, who didy estimate the importance of their influence in the country, induced me, after i had spent some time in Odessa and its environs, to take up my abode in one of the nearest of these colonies, a place called Lustdorf, lying twelve versts south of Odessa, on the shores of the Black Sea.
Having previously agreed with the " Schultz" (the bailift' or overseer) of the colony, concerning my board, I mounted my horse one fine morning, and rode out to my country lodgings, in the steppe. I passed through the gardens and khutors of Odessa, and by the " Little Fountain," where the people were occupied, hke the Danaides, with the ceaseless task of drawing water, and made my first halt at Funtal, in the garden of a ricli Greek resident of the steppe. I found his whole harem, consisting both of Greek and Jewish women, in the garden, and the gardener complained bitterly of the cabals of these women, whom he was obliged to furnish with fruits and flowers, in order to escape their calumnious gossip. I could have fancied myself in the east, although the garden looked little enough like it. It had cost an enormous sum of money, as ahnost every tree had an artificial soil, and there were some handsome kiosks, and almost as mai\y urns as trees. These urns had been sent for from Italy by the Greek prince, and as they were of various coloured marbles, aud he chose to have them white, he had hit on the expedient of hawng them all whitewashed !
From Funtal I rode on to a Russian convent, which also, Aiith its extensive garden, lay near the shore. It consisted of several spacious buildings and two churches (the Russian convents always contain several churches, sometimes four or five), and the pious monks had amused themselves with forming the flower beds and the hard clay of the steppe into all sorts of fanciful shapes — crosses and stars and pyramids — little hills, platforms, and flights of steps, and hermits' caves. They possessed also a deep weU, the water from which was drawn up by a tread-wheel, so arranged as to be trodden by some dogs trained to the exercise, who galloped round it Hke so many squirrels.
The convent lies on a sort of peninsula, on the point of which stands the light-house so important to Odessa. The glass in it is said to be English, but I doubt this, for it had many defects, and the defect of a glass in a light-house may sometimes prove the destruction of a ship, for without the defect in the glass the light would be visible some hundred yards further out at sea. The convent peninsula is considered dangerous to sliipping, and, indeed, has often proved destructive when an elongation of it, in the shape of a sand-bank, that has now disappeared, stretched out to a considerable distance.
On leaving the convent I rode along a little path that ran between the high terrace of the steppe, and the sea-beach, among fallen masses of land, such as I have already described, which had gradually become covered with luxuriant vegetation, and, being sheltered from the rough winds, even in some places with shrubs and mulberry-trees.
To the left lay the foaming sea, and to the right the precipice of the steppe, inhabited by jack-daws, owls, eagles, and other birds, which had built their nests in entirely inaccessible spots. The naked side of the chfF showed clearly all the diflerent strata, which, dming the lapse of thousands of years, had accumulated upon it.