While smoking a cigar on the bridge I was roused by the cry of “tigre! tigre!” from Borasdine.  I looked to where he pointed on the Chinese shore and could see an animal moving slowly through the grass.  It may have been a tiger, and so it was pronounced by the Russians who saw it; I have never looked upon a real tiger outside of a menagerie, and am not qualified to give an opinion.  I brought my opera glass and Borasdine Iris rifle, but the beast did not again show himself.  Provoked by this glimpse my companions retired to the cabin and made a theoretical combat with the animal until dinner time.

The day was made memorable by a decent dinner; the special reason for it was the fact that Borasdine had presented our caterer with an old coat.  I regretted I could not afford to reduce my wardrobe, else we would have secured another comfortable repast.  Both steward and cook were somewhat negligently clad, and possibly a spare garment or two might have opened their hearts and larders.

Of course the sight of the tiger led to stories about his kindred, and we whiled away a portion of the evening in narrating incidents of a more or less personal character.  An officer, who was temporarily our fellow-passenger, on his way to one of the Cossack posts, a few miles above, gave an account of his experience with a tiger on the Ousuree.

I was out (said he) on a survey that we were making on behalf of the government to establish the boundary between Russia and China.  The country was then less known than now; there were no settlements along the river, and with the exception of the villages of the natives, thirty or forty miles apart, the whole country was a wilderness.  At one village we were warned that a large tiger had within a month killed two men and attacked a third, who was saved only by the sudden and unexpected appearance of a party of friends.  We prepared our rifles and pistols, to avoid the possibility of their missing fire in case of an encounter with the man-stealing beast.  Rather reluctantly some of the natives consented to serve us as guides to the next village.  We generally found them ready enough to assist us, as we paid pretty liberally for their services, and made love to all the young women that the villages contained.  With an eye to a successful campaign, I laid in a liberal supply of trinkets to please these aboriginals, and found that they served their purposes admirably.  So the natives were almost universally kind to us, and their reluctance to accompany us on this occasion showed the great fear they entertained of the tiger.