to 290 pounds) of tallow, which is generally worth from eleven to fifteen rubles a pood. The article is always in demand, and such is the eagerness to obtain it, that not only is a part of the price often paid beforehand, while the oxen are still grazing on the steppe, but the wealthy merchants of Odessa and their clerks may constantly be seen parading their gay habiliments among the filthy abominations of the salgan, and crying out incessantly for tallow, tallow, and more tallow ! The cashier, meanwhile, is busily engaged in the counting-house. The steward of the estate comes in to receive the rent of the land on which the herd has fattened during the spring and summer ; the workmen come in to receive their wages ; cattle-dealers come in to contract for the supply of so many hundred oxen ; while some merchant stanchng by is ready, in his eagerness for the greasy treasure, to pay in advance for the tallow that has yet to be grown under the hides of those oxen ; a colonist comes in to bargain for the fattening up of some 200 hogs, which he afterwards receives back walking masses of hogslard, too yellow and coarse, however, for the market, till the grunters have been a little refined by sundry good feeds of corn ; Greeks from Constantinople come, as they did in the days when Olbia flourished ; some wealthy nobleman perhaps is anxious to farm the whole salgan for a few weeks, having some thousand of oxen ready for the kettle, but no estabhshment of his ovm. to boil them into fat and silver rubles ; a swineherd comes to buy sundry waggon -loads of the pressed meat wherewith to treat his interesting charges on the steppe ; soapboilers are there to bargain for the fat, turners to buy the horns, and tanners to carry away the hides ; the Turkish captains come eagerly to obtain the tallow in its greatest purity at the fountain-head, for tallow is too much esteemed by the gourmands of Constantinople to be idly wasted in enlightening their darkness ; in short, however busily Death may be at work, there is, meanwhile, no want either of life or bustle in the salgan. Nor is it men only that are eagerly running to and fro. The shaggy, long-haired dogs of the steppe arrive in swarms to fatten on the refuse, or to lap the thickening gore in the loathsome well into which it has been drained. Even more numerous are the white sea-gulls, who, under their dovelike plumage, hide the hearts of vultures. They become so tame and bold in the salgan, that they walk fearlessly among the workmen, and will scarcely rise from their meal when you drive them with a stick.
Such is the hideous scene presented by one of these dens of murder, where, in addition to its other delights, the air is heavy with myriads of insects that seem to have been bred by the soil, soaked as it is Avith blood.
A workman in one of these salgans, besides his board, earns about seventy or eighty rubles a month ; and as the work generally lasts some twelve or thirteen weeks, there are always candidates enough for the places. In the neighbourhood of Odessa there are seven salgans, and in these, probably, 25,000 oxen meet their deaths every year, without reckoning the countless numbers of sheep who share the same fate. Jn the vicinity of Kherson, Taganrog, Nikolayeff, Saratoff, Kisheneff, and other places, salgans will be found on an equally large scale. Many of the nobles again have salgans of their own ; and in fact, throughout the whole of southern Russia is man labouring in the same barbarous way for the enlightenment of Europe. To look on the graceful taper that burns so innocently upon my table, and sheds so soft and cheerful a light upon me, — and then to think of the filthy bloody scenes in which it had its birth !