the number of years of patient toil which must have preceded his first request for food, and I contemplated with astonishment the indefatigable perseverance which has borne him triumphant through the acquirement of such a language.  If the simple request for something to eat presented such apparently insurmountable obstacles to pronunciation, what must the language be in its dealings with the more abstruse questions of theological and metaphysical science?  Imagination stood aghast at the thought.

I frankly told the Major that he might print out this terrible sentence on a big placard and hang it around my neck; but as for learning to pronounce it, I could not, and did not propose to try.  I found out afterwards that he had taken advantage of my inexperience and confiding disposition by giving me some of the longest and worst words in his barbarous language, and pretending that they meant something to eat.  The real translation in Russian would have been bad enough, and it was wholly unnecessary to select peculiarly hard words.

The Russian language is, I believe, without exception, the most difficult of all modern languages to learn.  Its difficulty does not lie, as might be supposed, in pronunciation.  Its words are all spelled phonetically, and have only a few sounds which are foreign to English; but its grammar is exceptionally involved and intricate.  It has seven cases and three genders; and as the latter are dependent upon no definite principle whatever, but are purely arbitrary, it is almost impossible for a foreigner to learn them so as to give nouns and adjectives their proper terminations.  Its vocabulary is very copious; and its idioms have a peculiarly racy individuality which can hardly be appreciated without a thorough acquaintance with the colloquial talk of the Russian peasants.

The Russian, like all the Indo-European languages, is closely related to the ancient Sanscrit, and seems to have preserved unchanged, in a greater degree than any of the others, the old Vedic words.  The first ten numerals, as spoken by a Hindoo a thousand years before the Christian era, would, with one or two exceptions, be understood by a modern Russian peasant.

During our stay in Petropavlovsk we succeeded in learning the Russian for “Yes,” “No,” and “How do you do?” and we congratulated ourselves not a little upon even this slight progress in a language of such peculiar difficulty.

Our reception at Petropavlovsk by both Russians and Americans was most cordial and enthusiastic, and the first three or four days after our arrival were spent in one continuous round of visits and dinners.  On Thursday we made an excursion on horseback to a little village called Avacha, ten or fifteen versts distant across the bay, and came back charmed with the scenery, climate, and vegetation of this beautiful peninsula.  The road wound around the slopes of grassy, wooded hills, above the clear blue water of the bay, commanding a view of the bold purple promontories