aid he had often wondered what those
curious objects could be; and now, as I was an American, perhaps I
could tell him. He evidently had not the most remote suspicion that
they were intended to represent human beings. I told him that those
curious objects, as he called them, were American women. He burst out
into a "tyee-e-e-e!" of amazement, and asked with a wondering look,
"Are _all_ the women in your country as big as that at the bottom?" It
was a severe reflection upon our ladies' dress, and I did not venture
to tell him that the bigness was artificial, but merely replied sadly
that they were. He looked curiously down at my feet and then at the
picture, and then again at my feet, as if he were trying to trace some
resemblance between the American man and the American woman; but he
failed to do it, and wisely concluded that they must be of widely
different species.

[Illustration: A TUNGUSE SUMMER TENT]

The pictures from these papers are sometimes put to curious uses. In
the hut of a Christianised but ignorant native near Anadyrsk, I once
saw an engraved portrait, cut from _Harper's Weekly_, of Major General
Dix, framed, hung up in a corner of the room and worshipped as a
Russian saint! A gilded candle was burning before his smoky features,
and every night and morning a dozen natives crossed themselves and
said their prayers to a major-general in the United States Army! It
is the only instance, I believe, on record, where a major-general has
been raised to the dignity of a saint without even being dead.
St. George of England, we are told, was originally a corrupt army
contractor of Cappadocia, but he was not canonised until long
after his death, when the memory of his contracts was no more. For
Major-General Dix was reserved the peculiar privilege of being at the
same time United States Minister in Paris and a saint in Siberia!

[Illustration: Woman's fur lined Hood]

CHAPTER XXX

AN ARCTIC AURORA--ORDERS FROM THE MAJOR--ADVENTURES OF MACRAE AND
ARNOLD WITH THE CHUKCHIS--RETURN TO GIZHIGA--REVIEW OF WINTER'S WORK

Among the few pleasures which reward the traveller for the hardships
and dangers of life in the Far North, there are none which are
brighter or longer remembered than the magnificent auroral displays
which occasionally illumine the darkness of the long polar night, and
light up with a celestial glory the whole blue vault of heaven. No
other natural phenomenon is so grand, so mysterious, so t