If I may judge of their condition by a mere flying visit, I should say that in agriculture and domestic civilisation they are not very far behind the majority of German colonists.

Their houses are indeed small--so small that one of them might almost be put into a single room of a Mennonite's house; but there is an air of cleanliness and comfort about them that would do credit to a German housewife.
In spite of all this, these Bulgarians were, I could easily perceive, by no means delighted with their new home.

The cause of their discontent, so far as I could gather from the few laconic remarks which I extracted from them, seemed to be this: Trusting to the highly coloured descriptions furnished by the emigration agents who had induced them to change the rule of the Sultan for the authority of the Tsar, they came to Russia with the expectation of finding a fertile and beautiful Promised Land.

Instead of a land flowing with milk and honey, they received a tract of bare Steppe on which even water could be obtained only with great difficulty--with no shade to protect them from the heat of summer and nothing to shelter them from the keen northern blasts that often sweep over those open plains.

As no adequate arrangements had been made for their reception, they were quartered during the first winter on the German colonists, who, being quite innocent of any Slavophil sympathies, were probably not very hospitable to their uninvited guests.