of office.  I observed in the expression of his lips, as he handed me the spiked stick, a sort of latent smile of ridicule, which indicated a very low estimate of my dog-driving abilities; but I treated it as knowledge should always treat the sneers of ignorance—­with silent contempt; and seating myself firmly astride the sledge back of the arch, I shouted to the dogs, “Noo!  Pashol!” My voice failed to produce the startling effect that I had anticipated.  The leader—­a grim, bluff Nestor of a dog—­glanced carelessly over his shoulder and very perceptibly slackened his pace.  This sudden and marked contempt for my authority on the part of the dogs did more than all the sneers of the Koraks to shake my confidence in my own skill.  But my resources were not yet exhausted, and I hurled monosyllable, dissyllable, and polysyllable at their devoted heads, shouted “Akh!  Te shelma!  Proclataya takaya!  Smatree!  Ya tibi dam!” but all in vain; the dogs were evidently insensible to rhetorical fireworks of this description, and manifested their indifference by a still slower gait.  As I poured out upon them the last vial of my verbal wrath, Dodd, who understood the language that I was so recklessly using, drove slowly up, and remarked carelessly, “You swear pretty well for a beginner.”  Had the ground opened beneath me I should have been less astonished.  “Swear!  I swear!  You don’t mean to say that I’ve been swearing?”—­“Certainly you have, like a pirate.”  I dropped my spiked stick in dismay.  Were these the principles of dog-driving which I had evolved out of the depths of my moral consciousness?  They seemed rather to have come from the depths of my immoral unconsciousness.  “Why, you reckless reprobate!” I exclaimed impressively, “didn’t you teach me those very words yourself?”—­“Certainly I did,” was the unabashed reply; “but you didn’t ask me what they meant; you asked how to pronounce them correctly, and I told you.  I didn’t know but that you were making researches in comparative philology—­trying to prove the unity of the human race by identity of oaths, or by a comparison of profanity to demonstrate that the Digger Indians are legitimately descended from the Chinese.  You know that your head (which is a pretty good one in other respects) always was full of such nonsense.”—­“Dodd,” I observed, with a solemnity which I intended should awaken repentance in his hardened sensibilities, “I have been betrayed unwittingly into the commission of sin; and as a little more or less won’t materially alter my guilt, I’ve as good a notion as ever I had to give you the benefit of some of your profane instruction.”  Dodd laughed derisively and drove on.  This little episode considerable dampened my enthusiasm, and made me very cautious in my use of foreign language.  I feared the existence of terrific imprecations in the most common dog-phrases, and suspected lurking profanity even in the monosyllabic “Khta” and “Hoogh,” which I had been taught to believe meant “right”