and pillows from the sleigh of Schwartz and Malchanski, and went to bed on the floor.  As a result of this misadventure, our homeward progress was stopped, and we had to stay at the village of Krestofskaya two days, while we repaired damages.  Our sleigh, when it came in that morning, was a mass of ice; our fur bag, blankets, pillows, and spare clothing were water-soaked and frozen solid; and the contents of our leather pouches were almost ruined.  By distributing our things among half a dozen houses we succeeded in getting them thawed out and dried in time to make another start at the end of the second day; but after that time I did not allow myself to fall asleep at night.  We had escaped once, but we might not be so fortunate again, and I decided to watch the line of evergreen bushes myself.  When we lost the road in the darkness afterward, as we frequently did, I made the driver stop and searched the river myself on foot until I found it.  The danger that I feared was not so much getting drowned as getting wet.  In temperatures that were almost continuously below zero, and often twenty or thirty degrees below, a man in water-soaked clothing would freeze to death in a very short time, and there were so many air-holes and areas of thin ice that watchfulness was a matter of vital necessity.

Day after day and night after night we rode swiftly westward, up a river that was always more than a mile in width and often two or three; past straggling villages of unpainted log houses clinging to the steep sides of the mountainous shores; through splendid precipitous gorges, like those above the Iron Gate of the Danube; along stretches of flat pasture land where shaggy, white Yakut ponies were pawing up the snow to get at the withered grass; through good-sized towns like Kirinsk and Vitimsk, where we began to see signs of occidental civilisation; and finally, past a stern-wheel, Ohio-River steamboat, of primitive type, tied up and frozen in near the head of navigation at Verkholensk.  “Just look at that steamer!” cried Price, with an unwonted glow of enthusiasm in his boyish face.  “Doesn’t that look like home?” At Verkholensk we abandoned the Lena, which we had followed up almost to its source, and, leaving the ice for the first time in two weeks, we started across country in a line nearly parallel with the western coast of Lake Baikal.  We had been forty-one days on the road from Okhotsk; had covered a distance of about 2300 miles, and were within a day’s ride of Irkutsk.

One bright sunshiny morning in early December, from the crest of a high hill on the Verkholensk road, we got our first view of the east-Siberian capital—­a long compact mass of wooden houses with painted window-shutters; white-walled buildings with roofs of metallic green; and picturesque Russo-Byzantine churches whose snowy towers were crowned with inverted balloons of gold or covered with domes of ultramarine blue spangled with golden stars.  Long lines of loaded sledges