to ignore our presence, and not until they had finished did they turn to us, shake hands, and wish us a merry Christmas.  Dodd gave each of them a few kopecks, and with repeated wishes of merry Christmas, long life, and much happiness to our “High Excellencies,” the men withdrew to visit in turn the other houses of the village.  One band of singers came after another, until at daylight all the younger portion of the population had visited our house, and received our kopecks.  Some of the smaller boys, more intent upon the acquisition of coppers than they were upon the solemnity of the ceremony, rather marred its effect by closing up their hymn with “Christ is born, gim’me some money!” but most of them behaved with the utmost propriety, and left us greatly pleased with a custom so beautiful and appropriate.  At sunrise all the tapers were extinguished, the people donned their gayest apparel, and the whole village gave itself up to the unrestrained enjoyment of a grand holiday.  Bells jangled incessantly from the church tower; dog-sledges, loaded with girls, went dashing about the streets, capsising into snow-drifts and rushing furiously down hills amid shouts of laughter; women in gay flowery calico dresses, with their hair tied up in crimson silk handkerchiefs, walked from house to house, paying visits of congratulation and talking over the arrival of the distinguished American officers; crowds of men played football on the snow, and the whole settlement presented an animated, lively appearance.

On the evening of the third day after Christmas, the priest gave in our honour a grand Siberian ball, to which all the inhabitants of the four villages were invited, and for which the most elaborate preparations were made.  A ball at the house of a priest on Sunday night struck me as implying a good deal of inconsistency and I hesitated about sanctioning so plain a violation of the fourth commandment.  Dodd, however, proved to me in the most conclusive manner that, owing to difference in time, it was Saturday in America and not Sunday at all; that our friends at that very moment were engaged in business or pleasure and that our happening to be on the other side of the world was no reason why we should not do what our antipodal friends were doing at exactly the same time.  I was conscious that this reasoning was sophistical, but Dodd mixed me up so with his “longitude,” “Greenwich time,” “Bowditch’s Navigator,” “Russian Sundays” and “American Sundays,” that I was hopelessly bewildered, and could not have told for my life whether it was today in America or yesterday, or when a Siberian Sunday did begin.  I finally concluded that as the Russians kept Saturday night, and began another week at sunset on the Sabbath, a dance would perhaps be sufficiently innocent for that evening.  According to Siberian ideas of propriety it was just the thing.