telegraph wire did
not make as good fish-nets and dog-harnesses as some of our salesmen
confidently predicted that it would; and lime-juice and water, as
a beverage, even when drunk out of pressed-crystal insulators,
beautifully tinted with green, did not seem to commend itself to
the aboriginal mind. So we finally had to shut up our store. We
had gathered in--if I remember rightly--about three hundred rubles
($150.), which, with the money that Major Abaza had left us, amounted
to something like five hundred. I did not use this cash, however, in
the payment of the Company's debts. I expected to have to return to
the United States through Siberia, and I did not propose to put myself
in such a position that I should be compelled to defray my travelling
expenses by peddling lime-juice, cucumber pickles, telegraph wire,
dried apples, glass insulators, and baking-powder along the road. I
therefore persuaded the Company's creditors, who, fortunately, were
not very numerous, to take tea and sugar in satisfaction of their
claims, so that I might save all the cash I had for the overland trip
from Okhotsk to St. Petersburg.

Our business in Gizhiga was finally adjusted and settled; our
working-parties were all called in; and we were just about to sail in
the bark _Onward_ for Okhotsk, when we were suddenly confronted by
the deadliest peril that we had encountered in more than two years of
arctic experience. Every explorer who goes into a wild, unknown part
of the world to make scientific researches, to find a new route for
commerce, or to gratify an innate love of adventure, has, now and
then, an escape from a violent death which is so extraordinary that he
classifies it under the head of "narrow." The peril that he incurs may
be momentary in duration, or it may be prolonged for hours, or even
days; but in any case, while it lasts it is imminent and deadly. It is
something more than ordinary danger--it is peril in which the chances
of death are a hundred and of life only one. Such peril advances, as
a rule, with terrifying swiftness and suddenness; and if one be
unaccustomed to danger, he is liable to be beaten down and overwhelmed
by the quick and unexpected shock of the catastrophe. He has no time
to rally his nervous forces, or to think how he will deal with the
emergency. The crisis comes like an instantaneous "Vision of Sudden
Death," which paralyses all his faculties before he has a chance to
exercise them. Swift danger o