h white
sugar into a rich delicious jam. We had come to Kamchatka with minds
and mouths heroically made up for an unvarying diet of blubber, tallow
candles, and train-oil; but imagine our surprise and delight at being
treated instead to such Sybaritic luxuries as purple blueberries,
cream, and preserved rose-leaves! Did Lucullus ever feast upon
preserved rose-petals in his, vaunted pleasure-gardens of Tusculum?
Never! The original recipe for the preparation of celestial ambrosia
had been lost before ever "Lucullus supped with Lucullus"; but it was
rediscovered by the despised inhabitants of Kamchatka, and is now
offered, to the world as the first contribution of the Hyperboreans to
gastronomical science. Take equal quantities of white loaf sugar
and the petals of the Alpine rose, add a little juice of crushed
blueberries, macerate together to a rich crimson paste, serve in the
painted cups of trumpet honeysuckles, and imagine yourself feasting
with the gods upon the summit of high Olympus!

As soon as possible after supper, I stretched myself out upon the
floor under a convenient table, which answered practically and
aesthetically all the purposes of a four-post bedstead, inflated my
little rubber pillow, rolled myself up, _a la_ mummy, in a blanket,
and slept.

The Major, always an early riser, was awake on the following morning
at daylight. Dodd and I, with a coincidence of opinion as rare as it
was gratifying, regarded early rising as a relic of barbarism which no
American, with a proper regard for the civilisation of the nineteenth
century, would demean himself by encouraging. We had therefore entered
into a mutual agreement upon this occasion to sleep peacefully until
the "caravan," as Dodd irreverently styled it, should be ready to
start, or at least until we should receive a summons for breakfast.
Soon after daybreak, however, a terrific row began about something,
and with a vague impression that I was attending a particularly
animated primary meeting in the Ninth Ward, I sprang up, knocked my
head violently against a table-leg, opened my eyes in amazement, and
stared wildly at the situation. The Major, in a scanty _deshabille,_
was storming furiously about the room, cursing our frightened drivers
in classical Russian, because the horses had all stampeded during the
night and gone, as he said with expressive simplicity, "Chort
tolko znal kooda"--"the devil only knew where." This was rather an
unfortunate begin