ODESSA AND MISKITCHEE. 55 



village looked asleep in the sunshine as we passed it 

 by: a straggling group of one- storied hovels, with 

 the sunlight glinting on rows of yellow gourds on 

 the thatch ; a dark, good-looking Tartar girl in a 

 scarlet cap and many ringlets, much bespangled 

 with small gilt coins, standing in a doorway, 

 round which there was some sort of an enclosure. 

 At another cottage door, with his legs in the mud 

 of the main street and his quarters on the somewhat 

 drier mud of his dining-room floor, lounged, ciga- 

 rette in mouth, a pink-shirted Russian motijik. 

 Inside the hovel, if we had had time to look, we 

 should probably have seen a heap of bedclothes 

 between the roof and the top of the oven ; this 

 would be the baboushka's (grandmother's) bed. 

 A wooden bedstead with more disarranged clothes 



O 



on the floor ; here the rest of the family, mother 

 and father and brats, all sleep ; a filthy, open fire- 

 place, in one corner ; a ragged woman, of ape-like 

 propensities, combing a dirty child in another ; and 

 on the floor two more half-naked brats, lighting 

 over the family loaf of black bread, from which 

 they are in vain endeavouring to hammer a morsel 

 with the back of an axe. From a blackened 

 greasy beam overhead, adorned with a lew strings 

 of onions and withered apples, a dim light shines 

 down upon the whole, proceeding from a tin of 

 mutton fat, which makes the whole interior as un- 

 savoury as it is ugly. 



