Chapter 36

We have got so far east, now--a hundred and fifty-five degrees of
longitude from San Francisco--that my watch can not "keep the hang" of
the time any more. It has grown discouraged, and stopped. I think it
did a wise thing. The difference in time between Sebastopol and the
Pacific coast is enormous. When it is six o'clock in the morning here,
it is somewhere about week before last in California. We are excusable
for getting a little tangled as to time. These distractions and
distresses about the time have worried me so much that I was afraid my
mind was so much affected that I never would have any appreciation of
time again; but when I noticed how handy I was yet about comprehending
when it was dinner-time, a blessed tranquillity settled down upon me, and
I am tortured with doubts and fears no more.

Odessa is about twenty hours' run from Sebastopol, and is the most
northerly port in the Black Sea. We came here to get coal, principally.
The city has a population of one hundred and thirty-three thousand, and
is growing faster than any other small city out of America. It is a free
port, and is the great grain mart of this particular part of the world.
Its roadstead is full of ships. Engineers are at work, now, turning the
open roadstead into a spacious artificial harbor. It is to be almost
inclosed by massive stone piers, one of which will extend into the sea
over three thousand feet in a straight line.

I have not felt so much at home for a long time as I did when I "raised
the hill" and stood in Odessa for the first time. It looked just like an
American city; fine, broad streets, and straight as well; low houses,
(two or three stories,) wide, neat, and free from any quaintness of
architectural ornamentation; locust trees bordering the sidewalks (they
call them acacias;) a stirring, business-look about the streets and the
stores; fast walkers; a familiar new look about the houses and every
thing; yea, and a driving and smothering cloud of dust that was so like a
message from our own dear native land that we could hardly refrain from
shedding a few grateful tears and execrations in the old time-honored
American way. Look up the street or down the street, this way or that
way, we saw only America! There was not one thing to remind us that we
were in Russia. We walked for some little distance, reveling in this
home vision, and then we came upon a church and a hack-driver, and
presto! the illusion vanished! The church had a slender-spired dome that
rounded inward at its base, and looked like a turnip turned upside down,
and the hackman seemed to be dressed in a long petticoat with out any
hoops. These things were essentially foreign, and so were the carriages
--but every body knows about these