At first we come to the fields immediately around the village. These are covered with rj-e, wheat, Indian corn, and barley, but thistles of a treelike altitude, and a variety of other luxuriant weeds, spring out from among the corn, for there are few farmers here who manifest their love of order by the tidiness of their cornfields. Next, we arrive at the little army of village windmills, of which there are sometimes as many as a hundred close together, with the millers and their men plying busily among them. Not far from the mills is generally the common pasturage, on wliich seldom less than a hundred oxen may be seen ruminating and masticating together. Some forty or fifty light waggons laden with merchandise are neatly grouped around, while their di'ivers are actively engaged collecting dry weeds and dung, for the purX)se of kindhng a fire. This field has been hospitably set aside by the village for the accommodation of travellers, each of whom is at hberty to drive liis cattle into it. Should the village happen to lie near a main road, an evening will rarely pa«s over without the arrival of one or two caravans, to avail themselves of so considerate an arrangement. Among the guests there wiU generally be found a group of itinerant gipsies, who travel from village to village during the summer, and are the chief smiths, sievemakers, and horse-dealers of Little Russia. During winter, these people hide themselves in underground holes, in the suburb of some town, where they are registered by the police. The invariable accompaniment to every gipsy tent, is a couple of light waggons, that serve the whole party at night for beds. The steps of these waggons are let down to supply the want of chairs and ottomans, and over them the smoky picture of some saint or idol is sure to be suspended. The mother of the family, with a pipe in her mouth, superintends the domestic economy of the Httle household ; that is to say, she bangs the children about, and drives the dogs from the kettle. A young girl, as slender as a birchtree, as lovely a figure as you could wish for the part of Preciosa, but with a pipe projecting from between her lips, may be seen fetching water from the nearest well. The master of the tent, likewise smoking, is plying Jiis trade as a smith in front of his ambulatory home ; a Russian peasant stands looking on ; the horses of the little colony are grazing around, and another gipsy is seen coming from the village, laden with invalided kettles and other time-worn specimens of metallic industry, that demand the repairing hand of the experienced Vulcan, and bearing at the same time a little cargo of cast-off habiliments, broken victuals, bones, and perhaps a hedgehog, the cherished delicacy of every gipsy gourmand.
We now enter the village itself. At the entrance, right and left, are two posts with various statistical notices relative to the popiJation of the place, the number of its houses, &c. A few inequalities in the surface, though now, perhaps, overgrown with grass, mark the place where formerly stood a saltpetre manufactory, for the soil of the steppes of the Ukraine is so full of saltpetre, that its collection forms one of the standing occupations of the country-people. Some peasant carts, dra^vn by oxen, enter the village with us, but at so leisurely a pace, one might suppose, Time, for them, had leaden weights, and not wings, to his feet. A group of Malorossian women follow. They have just returned from haymaking, and have decorated themselves most profusely with wreaths and garlands of flowers. They march two and two like a company of soldiers, and are singing so loud and joyously, one might take them for a troop of Amazons retiu'ning in triumph from some recent victory. Other groups of vocalists, meanwhile, may be more faintly heard arriving from the opposite side of the village.
The whitewashed cottages are ranged on either side, but are almost concealed by a luxm'iant growth of thistles and other weeds. Each little farm is environed by a close hedge of thorns, intended as a barrier against the encroachments of the wolf. From each door rush forth a pack of barking hounds, of whom there is a greater abundance m the villages, than there is of wolves in the open coiSitry, and that is not saying a little. Every village in Little Russia may match Constantinople itself for the density of its canine population ; but the cm's are little cared for, and are left to bark and howl and cater for themselves as best they may.