[Illustration: VILKOFF] This official was the most astonished man ever seen; his eyes fairly started out of their orbits; he looked first at us, then at the canoes, and then at the Stars and Stripes and Union-jack flying from the masts, but seemed too much dazed to utter a word. At last he opened his mouth and asked, with a tremor in his speech: “Why are you landing here?” “The wind is so heavy we can’t go on,” we replied. “What’s your business?” We explained to the best of our ability, not forgetting to mention the profession of civil engineer we had adopted up the river. “But you had better not land here!” he urged. “We must land; we can’t go on until the wind drops.” “You certainly can’t stay here, for there is no hotel, and you won’t be able to get anything to eat.” “We don’t want a hotel and we have food in our boats.” “What did you come here for?” We explained again that we were travelling to see the country. “There is nothing to see here, and you had better not stop.” “But,” we insisted, becoming a little weary of his obstinate and stupid repetitions, “we can’t possibly go on until the wind moderates, and, furthermore, we don’t propose to try. Here are our passports, _viséed_ by the representative of his Imperial Majesty, the Czar.” The sight of two large documents, quite unlike anything called passports he had ever before seen, only added to his distress, and he looked at them with much the expression of a man who sees the warrant for his arrest in the hands of a sheriff. At this juncture two young men came up, introduced themselves to us as fish merchants of the place, interceded in our behalf, and succeeded in calming the old man’s excitement so that he looked at the _visés_ on our passports and told us to come ashore. After further discussion he consented to register and stamp our papers, but refused to give them back to us, saying we could have them again when we went away. All the arguments we could invent were eloquently used in the hope of persuading him to permit us to land our sketching materials, and our two young allies, who had been educated in Odessa and understood our position, joined their voices to ours, but all in vain. Not an article must be removed from the canoes--not even [Illustration: FISHING STATION ON THE BLACK SEA] a sketch-book--and, furthermore, we must promise not to sketch anything before we would be allowed to go into the village. Seeing the place even with this restriction was better than dangling our heels from the edge of the quay all the afternoon, and we accepted the invitation of one of the fish merchants to drink tea with him, and strolled off into the village.