ated ourselves
not a little upon even this slight progress in a language of such
peculiar difficulty.

Our reception at Petropavlovsk by both Russians and Americans was most
cordial and enthusiastic, and the first three or four days after our
arrival were spent in one continuous round of visits and dinners. On
Thursday we made an excursion on horseback to a little village called
Avacha, ten or fifteen versts distant across the bay, and came back
charmed with the scenery, climate, and vegetation of this beautiful
peninsula. The road wound around the slopes of grassy, wooded hills,
above the clear blue water of the bay, commanding a view of the bold
purple promontories which formed the gateway to the sea, and revealing
now and then, between the clumps of silver birch, glimpses of long
ranges of picturesque snow-covered mountains, stretching away along
the western coast to the white solitary peak of Villuchinski, thirty
or forty miles distant. The vegetation everywhere was almost tropical
in its rank luxuriance. We could pick handfuls of flowers almost
without bending from our saddles, and the long wild grass through
which we rode would in many places sweep our waists. Delighted to
find the climate of Italy where we had anticipated the biting air of
Labrador, and inspirited by the beautiful scenery, we woke the echoes
of the hills with American songs, shouted, halloed, and ran races on
our little Cossack ponies until the setting sun warned us that it was
time to return.

Upon the information which he obtained in Petropavlovsk, Major Abaza
formed a plan of operations for the ensuing winter, which was briefly
as follows: Mahood and Bush were to go on in the _Olga_ to Nikolaievsk
at the mouth of the Amur River, on the Chinese frontier, and, making
that settlement their base of supplies, were to explore the rough
mountainous region lying west of the Okhotsk Sea and south of the
Russian seaport of Okhotsk. The Major and I, in the meantime, were
to travel northward with a party of natives through the peninsula of
Kamchatka, and strike the proposed route of the line about midway
between Okhotsk and Bering Strait. Dividing again here, one of
us would go westward to meet Mahood and Bush at Okhotsk, and
one northward to a Russian trading station called Anadyrsk
(ah-nah'-dyrsk), about four hundred miles west of the Strait. In this
way we should cover the whole ground to be traversed by our line,
with the exception of the barren de