Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 9.djvu/93

 OPERATIONS IN THE SEA OF AZOF. G3 sufficed to make the enemy's Admiral run ashore, CHAP. and burn down his four surviving war-steamers L_ — surviving as we saw, out of that which, until dispersed by M'Killop, had been ' The squadron of ' Kertch.' After this hastened act of despondency the unchai- Eussians had no vessel left with which to watch, master of . the Allies in much less oppose the advance of their naval m- the hi. i,<ti.. vader. Young Lyons found himself master — the undisturbed unchallenged master — of what a few hours before had been a fast closed Eussian lake surrounded on all sides by Eussian provinces, and affording them a natural outlet, a privileged high- way of their own. Long accustomed to have it imagined that they Access time ° ... obtained to could not be assailed with impunity in the trunk the interior of their empire, Eussians bitterly felt the sharp Russia; thrust which a new irresistible power was now — with strange ease — driving home. How deep the as, e.g., to ° °. the country thrust went, people easily saw when observing of the Don OOSSflCKS. that the eastermost of the provinces coerced by the Maritime Powers, and unable thenceforth to send out so much as a sail or a boat from the mouths of its own famous river, was the one that furnished to Russia her Kozaks, or ' Cossacks of ' the Don ' — men deemed so transcendently Eus- sian that — although, as I think, without justice — the figurative diction of many (including the great Napoleon) has made the name of their race an equivalent for Eussia herself. By the French more especially, who had heard what their mothers could tell them of ' The Cossacks ! the
 * ■*■, 'closed
 * ■ ^ provinces of