The synagogue was a room about forty feet square. The walls were ornamented with Hebrew sentences from the Old Testament, and in numerous little niches around lay the Bibles and Talmuds of the congregation. Before a screen at the upper end was a small table, covered with a cloth that was a mass of gold, embroidery, and seed pearls. On either side were desks, on which lay the Books of the Law, and above the screen stood the golden candlesticks with their seven mystical branches. Ostrich eggs and crimson horse-tails were suspended from the roof, as in a Turkish mosque, and the floor was covered with an unusual number of magnificent Persian rugs, laid one over the other. As we passed through some other small courts and gardens, we saw several women peeping at us from behind the doors. At length two or three gained courage enough to show themselves, and very pretty they looked in their picturesque costume. They had white chemises, with large loose sleeves, bound with red round the throat and arms, and a broad border of the same colour on their short black petticoats. They wore on their heads a little fez with a bright purple tassel, and each fair Jewess had four or five thick plaits of hair hanging down almost to her feet. We were lost in admiration at the length and beauty of these tresses, but, alas! discovered that they were heirlooms, not growing on the heads, but sewn on to the fezzes of the wearers, and with care they may sometimes serve two, or even three generations. Jews, as a class, are sometimes said to be oppressed and ill-treated in Russia, but certainly in Eupatoria they were the only people we saw who were clean and thoroughly well dressed, and whose houses appeared comfortable and comparatively free from oil. The wind favoured us, and we had an excellent run from Eupatoria to Old Fort, where the English troops landed on the 14th of September, 1854. As we were rowing on shore the breeze shifted, and we suddenly found ourselves enveloped in a dense shower of locusts. The flight was so enormous that it quite darkened the air, and explained the meaning of a singular cloud we had been watching for some hours, thinking, as it came up, that it must bode either thunder or heavy rain. It was sufficiently disagreeable to have these revolting animals falling upon one every second, but this annoyance was as nothing compared with the horror of the smell that assailed us when we came to the shore. Myriads of dead and dying locusts were lying in masses upon the ground. The day was intensely hot, and the sun, streaming upon the mass of decaying insects, seemed to draw a cloud of pestilential vapour from the ground, while every now and then a puff of sickening miasma came from a little piece of water close by, rightly called the Foetid Lake, from some peculiarity of the mud on its banks.