only for a police-officer, to note down the circumstances of the disaster; and, without the smallest effort towards restoring respiration, proceed in the ceremony of interment. A poor woman in bathing, during our stay at Woronetz, fell beyond her depth. She struggled some time with the stream, and, being carried by it about three hundred yards, was taken out by some peasants before she had either sunk or lost her power of motion. When laid on the earth, she groaned and moved; but the water which had been swallowed rendered her face black, and she became apparently lifeless. She was therefore immediately pronounced to be really dead. No endeavour on our part, accompanied by persuasion and by offers of money, could induce the spectators either to touch the body, or to suffer any remedy to be attempted towards her recovery. They seemed afraid to approach what they considered as a corpse. In vain we explained to them the process by which persons, so circumstanced, are restored to life in England. They stood at a distance, crossing themselves, and shaking their heads; and in this manner the poor woman was left upon the shore, until it would have been too late to have made use of any means for her recovery. If she were not afterwards buried alive, her death was certainly

CHAP.

XI.

owing to a shameful and an obstinate neglect of remedies, which, in her case, promised every success. The police-officer gave in his memorial, and her body was committed to the grave.

We left Woronetz, June 12th; crossing the river at the bottom of the town, and entering plains as before. The swamps below Woronetz at once explain the cause of the annual fevers to which its inhabitants are liable: they exhale, during warm seasons, vapours as unwholesome as those which arise from the fens of Italy,

There are few finer prospects than that of Woronetz, viewed a few versts from the town, on the road to Paulovskoy. Throughout the whole of this country are seen, dispersed over immense plains, mounds of earth covered with a fine turf; the sepulchres of the antient world, common to almost every habitable country. If there exist any thing of former times, which may afford monuments of primeval manners, it is this mode of burial. They seem to mark the progress of mankind in the first ages after the dispersion; rising wherever the posterity of Noah came. Whether under the form of a Mound in Scandinavia, in Russia, or in North

America'; a Barrow in England; a Cairn in Wales, in Scotland, or in Ireland; or of those heaps which the modern Greeks and Turks call Tépe; or, lastly, in the more artificial shape of a Pyramid in Egypt; they had universally the same origin. They present the simplest and sublimest monument that any generation of men could raise over the bodies of their forefathers; being calculated for almost endless duration, and speaking a language more impressive than the most studied epitaph upon Parian marble. When beheld in a distant evening horizon, skirted by the rays of the setting sun, and, as it were, touching the clouds which hover over them, imagination represents the spirits of departed heroes as descending to irradiate a warrior's grave'. Some of those mounds appeared with forms so simple, and yet so artificial, in a plain otherwise level, that no doubt whatsoever could be entertained concerning their origin. Others, more antient, have at last sunk into the earth, and left a hollow place, encircled by a kind of fosse, which

(1) See the Journal of a Tour into the Territory North-west of the Alleghany Mountains, by Thaddeus Mason Harris; Boston, 1805; for a very curious account of the Sepulchral Mounds in America; the history of which is lost, as the author expresseth it, "in the oblivion of ages."

(2) See the Vignette to this Chapter.

still marks their situation. Again, others, by the passage of the plough annually upon their surface, have been considerably diminished. These Tumuli are the Sepulchres referred to by Herodotus, in the earliest accounts which history has recorded of this mode of burial'. The tombs of the Scythian kings are said, by him, to exist in the remotest parts of Scythia, where the Borysthenes is first known to be navigable; and they are further described as being constructed precisely according to the appearance they now exhibit.

We frequently met with caravans of the Malo-Russians, who differ altogether from the inhabitants of the rest of Russia. Their features are those of the Polonese, or Cossacks. They are a more noble race; stouter and better looking than the Russians, and superior to them in every thing that can exalt one class of men above another. They are cleaner, more industrious, more honest, more generous, more polite, more courageous, more hospitable, more truly pious, and, of course, less superstitious. Their language only differs from the Russian, as the dialect of the southern provinces of France does from the dialect spoken near Paris. They

(1) Herodot. Melpom. c. 71.

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have in many instances converted the desolate CHAP. steppe into fields of corn. Their caravans are drawn by oxen, which proceed about thirty versts in a day. Towards evening, they halt in the middle of a plain, near some pool of water; when their little waggons are all drawn up into a circle, and their cattle are suffered to graze around them; while the drivers, stretched out upon the smooth turf, take their repose, or enjoy their pipes, after the toil and heat of the day. If they meet a carriage, they all take off their caps and bow. The meanest Russians bow to each other, but never to a stranger.

south of

South of Woronetz we found the country Plains perfectly level, and the roads (if a fine turf Woronetz, lawn may be so denominated) the finest, at this season, perhaps in the whole world. The turf upon which we travelled was smooth and firm, without a stone or a pebble, or even the mark of wheels, and we experienced little or no dust. Nothing could be more delightful than this part of our journey. The whole of these

(2) Steppe is the name given, in the South of Russia, to those plains, which, though capable of cultivation, have never been tilled. They are covered with wild plants; and sometimes, perhaps improperly, ealled deserts. In America, similar plains are called Prairies.