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382 the work, you, yourself, during seven or eight bad months of your year, leave for the south wherever you please. But you have in the south a special portion where the main portion of you live. That part is called New Russia."

"Is that Odessa and Kherson?"

"That is in your time; but behold where the New Russia is."

Mountains clad in gardens; amid the mountains narrow ravines, wide valleys. "These mountains used to be naked crags," says the elder sister. "Now they are covered with a thick layer of earth, and often amid the garden grow copses of lofty trees, beneath which, on the damp hollows, are plantations of coffee-trees; higher up, date-palms, fig-trees, vineyards mingled with plantations of sugarcane; in the fields grow wheat, but there is more of rice."

"What land is this?"

"Let us for a moment rise a little higher, and you shall see that it is boundless." Far to the northwest are wide rivers, which unite and flow towards those eastern and southern places from which Viéra Pavlovna is looking. Farther, in that same southeasterly direction, she sees long, wide bays; on the south the land stretches far away between these bays, and the long, narrow sea which forms its western boundary. Between the narrow bays and the sea, which opens out towards the west is a narrow isthmus. "But we are in the centre of the desert," says the astonished Viéra Pavlovna.

"Yes, the centre of what used to be a desert, but now, as you see, everything has been changed, all the space from the Green River on the northeast has been turned into a fertile land, just as it was in olden times; and again it has become that zone, extending to the north, which in olden times was said to 'overflow with milk and honey.'

"We are not very far, as you see, from the southern boundary of the cultivated land; the mountainous part of the peninsula remains, as yet, a sandy, fruitless steppe, such as, in your day, the whole peninsula used to be. Every year the people, you Russians, are pushing away the boundary of the desert to the south; others are working in other lands; all have sufficient room, and enough to do to live comfortably and abundantly; yes, from the great northeastern rivers. All the region towards the south, till you