fresh cloth, polished china, and glittering silver.  We were fairly dazzled at the sight of so much unusual and unexpected magnificence.  After the inevitable “fifteen drops” of brandy, and the lunch of smoked fish, rye bread, and caviar, which always precedes a Russian dinner, we took seats at the table and spent an hour and a half in getting through the numerous courses of cabbage soup, salmon pie, venison cutlets, game, small meat pies, pudding, and pastry, which were successively set before us, and in discussing the news of all the world, from the log villages of Kamchatka to the imperial palaces of Moscow and St. Petersburg.  Our hospitable host then ordered champagne, and over tall, slender glasses of cool beaded Cliquot we meditated upon the vicissitudes of Siberian life.  Yesterday we sat on the ground in a Korak tent and ate reindeer meat out of a wooden trough with our fingers, and today we dined with the Russian governor, in a luxurious house, upon venison cutlets, plum pudding, and champagne.  With the exception of a noticeable but restrained inclination on the part of Dodd and myself to curl up our legs and sit on the floor, there was nothing I believe in our behaviour to betray the barbarous freedom of the life which we had so recently lived, and the demoralising character of the influences to which we had been subjected.  We handled our knives and forks, and leisurely sipped our champagne with a grace which would have excited the envy of Lord Chesterfield himself.  But it was hard work.  No sooner did we return to our quarters than we threw off our uniform coats, spread our bearskins on the floor and sat down upon them with crossed legs, to enjoy a comfortable smoke in the good old free-and-easy style.  If our faces had only been just a little dirty we should have been perfectly happy!

The next ten days of our life at Gizhiga were passed in comparative idleness.  We walked out a little when the weather was not too cold, received formal calls from the Russian merchants of the place, visited the ispravnik and drank his delicious “flower tea” and smoked his cigarettes in the evening, and indemnified ourselves for three months of rough life by enjoying to the utmost such mild pleasures as the little village afforded.  This pleasant, aimless existence, however, was soon terminated by an order from the Major to prepare for the winter’s campaign, and hold ourselves in readiness to start for the Arctic Circle or the west coast of the Okhotsk Sea at a moment’s notice.  He had determined to explore a route for our proposed line from Bering Strait to the Amur River before spring should open, and there was no time to be lost.  The information which we could gather at Gizhiga with regard to the interior of the country was scanty, indefinite, and unsatisfactory.  According to native accounts, there were only two settlements between the Okhotsk Sea and Bering Strait, and the nearest of these—­Penzhina—­was four hundred versts distant.  The intervening