A partition was removed in our house, the floor made bare, the room brilliantly illuminated with candles stuck against the wall with melted grease, benches placed around three sides of the house for the ladies, and about five o’clock the pleasure-seekers began to assemble.  Rather an early hour perhaps for a ball, but it seemed a very long time after dark.  The crowd which soon gathered numbered about forty, the men being all dressed in heavy fur kukhlankas, fur trousers, and fur boots, and the ladies in thin white muslin and flowery calico prints.  The costumes of the respective sexes did not seem to harmonise very well, one being light and airy enough for an African summer, while the other seemed suitable for an arctic expedition in search of Sir John Franklin.  However, the general effect was very picturesque.  The orchestra which was to furnish the music consisted of two rudely made violins, two ballalaikas (bal-la-lai’-kahs) or triangular native guitars with two strings each, and a huge comb prepared with a piece of paper in a manner familiar to all boys.  Feeling a little curiosity to see how an affair of this kind would be managed upon Siberian principles of etiquette, I sat quietly in a sheltered corner and watched the proceedings.  The ladies, as fast as they arrived, seated themselves in a solemn row along a wooden bench at one end of the room, and the men stood up in a dense throng at the other.  Everybody was preternaturally sober.  No one smiled, no one said anything; and the silence was unbroken save by an occasional rasping sound from an asthmatic fiddle in the orchestra, or a melancholy toot, toot, as one of the musicians tuned his comb.  If this was to be the nature of the entertainment, I could not see any impropriety in having it on Sunday.  It was as mournfully suggestive as a funeral.  Little did I know, however, the capabilities of excitement which were concealed under the sober exteriors of those natives.  In a few moments a little stir around the door announced refreshments, and a young Chuancee brought round and handed to me a huge wooden bowl, holding about four quarts of raw frozen cranberries.  I thought it could not be possible that I was expected to eat four quarts of frozen cranberries! but I took a spoonful or two, and looked to Dodd for instructions.  He motioned to me to pass them along, and as they tasted like acidulated hailstones, and gave me a toothache, I was very glad to do so.

The next course consisted of another wooden bowl, filled with what seemed to be white pine shavings, and I looked at it in perfect astonishment.  Frozen cranberries and pine shavings were the most extraordinary refreshments that I had ever seen—­even in Siberia; but I prided myself upon my ability to eat almost anything, and if the natives could stand cranberries and shavings I knew I could.  What seemed to be white pine shavings I found upon trial to be thin shavings of raw frozen fish—­a great delicacy