re compelled to walk in order
to land on American soil, inspired me with no desire to repeat the
experiment.

East Cape, Bering Straits, practically "the end of the end of the
world," is about the last place where you would expect to find a white
man, especially in springtime, which, in this far North, answers to the
depth of winter in England. When we arrived there, East Cape had been
cut off by ice from the world ever since the previous summer, which
rendered the presence of "Billy," as the natives called him, the more
remarkable. At first I mistook the man for a Tchuktchi, for he had
adopted native costume, and a hard winter passed amongst these people,
combined with a painful skin disease, had reduced him to a skeleton. The
poor fellow had suffered severely, mentally and physically, and could
only crawl about the settlement with difficulty, and yet, when news
first reached the cape of our approach, he had set out to walk along the
coast and meet us, and was brought back from the first village, fifteen
miles away, more dead than alive. Billy was a young man, about
twenty-five years old, whose hardships had given him a middle-aged
appearance. He belonged to the American middle class and was apparently
well educated, and, as I suppress his name, there can be no harm in
giving his history.

A year before we found him, Billy had left his home in San Francisco to
ship as ordinary seaman on board a whaler. But a rough life and stormy
weather soon cured him of a love for the sea, and while his ship was
lying at Nome City he escaped, intending to try his luck at the
diggings. A report, however, had just reached Nome that tons of gold
were lying only waiting to be picked up on the coast of Siberia, and the
adventurous Billy, dazzled by dreams of wealth, determined to sink his
small capital in the purchase of a boat in which to sail away to the
Russian "El Dorado." Having stocked his craft with provisions, Billy
started alone from Nome, and after many hair-breadth escapes from
shipwreck in the Straits, managed to reach East Cape. This was early in
the month of August, when an American Revenue cutter is generally
cruising about, and the Californian was delighted with his kindly
reception from the Tchuktchis, ignoring that the latter are not so
pleasantly disposed when alone in their glory and fortified by a frozen
sea. For nearly a month Billy remained at East Cape, prospecting every
day, and working like a galley slave in th