exclamations of astonishment from the natives as I brought the bread into eclipse behind the lump of tallow.  My first lecture would have been a grand success if my native audience had only been able to understand the representative and symbolical character of the bread and tallow.  The great trouble was that their imaginative faculties were weak.  They could not be made to see that bread stood for the moon and tallow-for the earth, but persisted in regarding them as so many terrestrial products having an intrinsic value of their own.  They accordingly melted up the earth to drink, devoured the moon whole, and wanted another lecture immediately.  I endeavoured to explain to them that these lectures were intended to be astronomical, not gastronomical, and that eating and drinking up the heavenly bodies in this reckless way was very improper.  Astronomical science I assured them did not recognise any such eclipses as those produced by swallowing the planets, and however satisfactory such a course might be to them, it was very demoralising to my orrery.  Remonstrances had very little effect, and I was compelled to provide a new sun, moon, and earth for every, lecture.  It soon became evident to me that these astronomical feasts were becoming altogether too popular, for my audience thought nothing of eating up a whole solar system every night, and planetary material was becoming scarce.  I was finally compelled, therefore, to use stones and snowballs to represent celestial bodies, instead of bread and tallow, and from that time the interest in astronomical phenomena gradually abated and the popularity of my lectures steadily declined until I was left without a single hearer.

The short winter day of three hours had long since closed and the night was far advanced when after twenty-three days of rough travel we drew near our final destination—­the ultima Thule of Russian civilisation.  I was lying on my sledge nearly buried in heavy furs and half asleep, when the distant barking of dogs announced our approach to the village of Anadyrsk.  I made a hurried attempt to change my thick fur torbassa and overstockings for American boots, but was surprised in the very act by the drawing up of my sledge before the house of the Russian priest, where we intended to stop until we could make arrangements for a house of our own.

A crowd of curious spectators had gathered about the door to see the wonderful Amerikanse about whom they had heard, and prominent in the centre of the fur-clad group stood the priest, with long flowing hair and beard, dressed in a voluminous black robe, and holding above his head a long tallow candle which flared wildly in the cold night air.  As soon as I could disencumber my feet of my overstockings I alighted from my sledge, amid profound bows and “zdrastvuitias” from the crowd, and received a hearty welcome from the patriarchal priest.  Three weeks roughing it in the wilderness had not, I fancy, improved my