No traces of the past are to be found about Sevastopol, — every thing Is fresh, smart, and bran new. The view of the city from a distance is veiy fine, its handsome buildings and churches rising as if directly out of the sea, whose waves, after roaring and dashing without, find shelter within the walls, and in spacious basins. These tranquil and secure harbours reflect the busy movements of forty or fifty thousand people in perpetual active motion on land and water. It is absurd to find in our statistical tables Sevastopol rated as possessing only 5000 inhabitants, whilst there are never less than 10,000, and there have now been, for some time, no less than 30,000 troops encamped round the city to work at the fortifications, without counting the crews of the numerous ships of war constantly stationed here. The effect of all this warlike animation and bustle was greatly heightened to us by the contrast with the silence of the Tartar villages, imbosomed in fruit trees, through which we had passed in approaching it, while the immediate environs of the town are entu-ely destitute of trees, and as bald as the pate of a Mussulman. A few days before our arrival, the Russian fleet had returned from the Caucasus, and it exhibited many traces of the contests in which it had been engaged with the tempests and the Circassians. We sailed past a fine frigate, lying in quarantine, in which the sailors had hung up their eight hundred jackets and trousers in tlie rigging, to purify them from the plague, and the enormous ship-of-the fine ' Warsaw" was visible at a distance, dancing on the waves like a cockleshell. The greater part, and the best of the fortifications of Sevastopol, date only from the reign of the present emperor ; the materials have been furnished by the soft limestone found in the neighbourhood, which a good deal resembles the shell limestone used in the building of Odessa. It is of so yielding a textm-e that balls would remain sticking in it as in sand. It would be, however, so much the more vulnerable to the attacks of time, as may be judged from the houses of Odessa, which are already falling to decay. P'or the present every thing in Sevastopol is of com-se straight and in order, and it would afford a secure place of refuge for the Russian ships, should they ever be driven by English gunpowder from the Dardanelles.
One of the officers of the fleet had the kindness to take me in his handsome yawl, to see what was, perhaps, one of the most remarkable things in Sevastopol, the marvellous docks now building for the navy. Nature lias, indeed, freely contributed to this giant work, by preparing a lonostraight deep bay, protected on all sides. Nevertheless' there yet remained enough to be done. Thousands of workmen ha^'e been employed on these docks for upwards of five years, and they have cost I know not how many millions of rubles. The stone chiefly used in the construction of tliese docks is a beautiful, almost snow-white limestone in immense blocks, than which nothing can look better as longas they are new. Here and there a few blocks of granite may be seen. To estimate such works as these, one must see them while they are in progress, for afterwards the water admitted covers a great part of the work. Some even of the subordinate parts are astonishing enough ; as, for instance, the machinery for pumping out the water, the draining and fortifying a small low tract of the neighbouring shore, and then the enormous extent of the basins themselves, in which such swans as these giant frigates are to swim. In the vicinity of the docks lie some old ships-of-the line that serve for habitations for the workmen, and I was told that no less than 2000 were lodged in one of them.