of furs, I took a sleepy, blinking view of the situation, endeavouring
in a feeble sort of way to recollect where I was and how I came there.
A bright crackling fire of resinous pine boughs was burning on the
square log altar in the centre of the hut, radiating a fierce heat to
its remotest corner, and causing the perspiration to stand in great
beads on its mouldy logs and rough board ceiling. The smoke rose
lazily through the square hole in the roof toward the white,
solemn-looking stars, which winked soberly at us between the dark
overhanging branches of the larches. Mr. Leet, who acted as the Soyer
of our campaign, was standing over me with a slice of bacon impaled
on a bowie-knife in one hand, and a poker in the other--both of which
insignia of office he was brandishing furiously, with the intention
of waking me up more effectually. His frantic gesticulations had the
desired result. With a vague impression that I had been shipwrecked on
the Cannibal Islands and was about to be sacrificed to the tutelary
deities, I sprang up and rubbed my eyes until I gathered together my
scattered senses. Mr. Leet was in high glee. Our travelling companion,
the postilion, had manifested for several days an inclination to shirk
work and allow us to do all the road-breaking, while he followed
comfortably in our tracks, and by this strategic manoeuvre had
incurred Mr. Leet's most implacable hatred. The latter, therefore, had
waked the unfortunate man up before he had been asleep five hours, and
had deluded him into the belief that the aurora borealis was the first
flush of daylight. He had accordingly started off at midnight and was
laboriously breaking a road up the steep mountain side through three
feet of soft snow, relying upon Mr. Leet's promise that we would be
along before sunrise. At five o'clock, when I got up, the voices of
the postilion's men could still be heard shouting to their exhausted
dogs near the summit of the mountain. We all breakfasted as slowly as
possible, in order to give them plenty of time to break a road for us,
and did not finally start until after six o'clock.

It was a beautifully clear, still morning when we crossed the mountain
above the _yurt_, and wound around through bare open valleys, among
high hills, toward the seacoast. The sun had risen over the eastern
hill-tops, and the snow glittered as if strewn with diamonds, while
the distant peaks of the Viliga, appeared--

"Bathed in the tenderest p