Upon leaving Tula I went south to the Crimea. On the train I read Tolstoi’s “Sebastopol Sketches,” which contain about the most graphic descriptions of war ever written. Curiously enough the season of the year when I first saw Sebastopol was the same as Tolstoi describes upon his arrival in the besieged city in 1854. During all my stay there I could not get away from the remarkable coincidental similarity in conditions--December, 1854, and December, 1906. To be sure, Sebastopol was not besieged by alien foes from without, but it was besieged by revolutionists from within. This, like most ports and all naval stations, is a revolutionary stronghold. Only the day before my arrival an admiral or port officer had been assassinated. Sentinels patrolled the streets at intervals of one hundred feet. The Hotel Kist was guarded. Small bodies of troops were moving in different parts of the city, and when the early morning mist lifted, a half-dozen warships were revealed lying at anchor. For several hours during the forenoon large forces of cavalry and light artillery were kept manœuvering in the plain across the narrow strip of water from the _pristan_. It might just as well have been a besieged city. Save for the lack of wounded and dead men, the outward aspects of the town were every whit as warlike, and everywhere were the signs of martial law. These indications of unrest and readiness for trouble did not deter me from visiting Balaklava and lovely Yalta, or interesting Bakhtchi-Sarai, the old Crimean Tartar capital, and Tchoufout-Kali, the two thousand-year old Karaite[22] stronghold. After these visits I turned toward Odessa, which I reached via Eupatoria. Odessa being one third a Jewish city has long been a city of trouble--not so much because of the Jews as on account of the powerful Black Hundred organization made up of water-front laborers and the lowest elements of a special city, who, under governmental tutelage, from time to time break loose upon the Jews. Incipient and real massacres are apt to break out there any time. The governor-general, Kaulbars, is a notorious reactionary, and encourages every form of repression.