The charming young madame did not speak English but was fluent in French.  She was from Irkutsk, and had spent several years in the schools and society of St. Petersburg.  She had many reminiscences of the capital, and declared herself delighted with her home on the Amoor.  After dinner we retired to the balcony for prosaic tea drinking and a poetical study of the glories of an autumn sunset behind the hills of Manjouria.

There was no hotel in the town, and I had wondered where I should lodge.  Before I had been half an hour on shore, I was invited by Dr. Snider, the surgeon in chief of the province, to make my home at his house.  The doctor spoke English fluently, and told me he learned it from a young American at Ayan several years before.  He was ten years in government service at Ayan, and met there many of my countrymen.  Once he contemplated emigrating to New Bedford at the urgent solicitation of a whaling captain who frequently came to the Ohotsk sea.

Dr. Snider was from the German provinces of Russia, and his wife, a sister of Admiral Fulyelm, was born in Sweden.  They usually conversed in German but addressed their children in Russian.  They had a Swedish housemaid who spoke her own language in the family and only used Russian when she could not do otherwise.  Madame Snider told me her children spoke Swedish and Russian with ease, and understood German very well.  They intended having a French or English governess in course of time.

“I speak,” said the doctor, “German with my wife, Swedish to the housemaid, Russian to my other servants, French with some of the officers, English with occasional travelers, and a little Chinese and Manjour with the natives over the river.”

Blagoveshchensk has a pretty situation, and I should greatly prefer it to Nicolayevsk for permanent habitation.  In the middle of the Amoor valley and at the mouth of the Zeya, its commercial advantages are good and its importance increases every year.  It was founded in 1858 by General Mouravieff, but did not receive any population worthy of mention until after the treaty of Igoon in 1860.  The government buildings are large and well constructed, logs being the material in almost universal use for making walls.  A large unfinished house for the telegraph was pointed out to me, and several warehouses were in process of erection.

Late one afternoon the captain of the steamer Korsackoff invited me to visit Sakhalin-Oula-Hotun (city of the black river) on the opposite shore.  Though called a city it cannot justly claim more than two thousand inhabitants.  There was a crowd on the bank similar to the one at Igoon, most of the women and girls standing with their arms folded in their sleeves.  Several were seated close to the water and met the same misfortune as those in similar positions at Igoon.  The Korsackoff made a much greater swell than the Ingodah, and those who caught its effects were well moistened.  We landed from, the steamer’s boat and ascended the bank to the village.  Several fat old Manjours eyed us closely and answered with great brevity our various questions.