sledge to sleep, regardless of my remonstrances, and paying no attention whatever to my questions.  He was evidently becoming stupefied by the deadly chill, which struck through the heaviest furs, and which was constantly making insidious advances from the extremities to the seat of life.  He probably would not live through the night unless he could be roused, and might not live two hours.  Discouraged by his apparently hopeless condition, and exhausted by the constant struggle to keep warm, I finally lost all hope and reluctantly decided to abandon the search and camp.  By stopping where we were, breaking up one of our sledges for firewood, and boiling a little tea, I thought that Dodd might be revived; but to go on to the eastward seemed to be needlessly risking the lives of all without any apparent prospect of discovering the party or of finding wood.  I had just given the order to the natives nearest me to camp, when I thought I heard a faint halloo in the distance.  All the blood in my veins suddenly rushed with a great throb to the heart as I threw back my fur hood and listened.  Again, a faint, long-drawn cry came back through the still atmosphere from the sledges in advance.  My dogs pricked up their ears at the startling sound and dashed eagerly forward, and in a moment I came upon several of our leading drivers gathered in a little group around what seemed to be an old overturned whale-boat, which lay half buried in snow by the river’s bank.  The footprint in the sand was not more suggestive to Robinson Crusoe than was this weather-beaten, abandoned whale-boat to us, for it showed that somewhere in the vicinity were shelter and life.  One of the men a few moments before had driven over some dark, hard object in the snow, which he at first supposed to be a log of driftwood; but upon stopping to examine it, he found it to be an American whale-boat.  If ever we thanked God from the bottom of our hearts, it was then.  Brushing away with my mitten the long fringes of frost which hung to my eyelashes, I looked eagerly around for a house, but Gregorie had been quicker than I, and a joyful shout from a point a little farther down the river announced another discovery.  I left my dogs to go where they chose, threw away my spiked stick, and started at a run in the direction of the sound.  In a moment I saw Gregorie and the old Chukchi standing beside a low mound of snow, about a hundred yards back from the river-bank, examining some dark object which projected from its smooth white surface.  It was the long talked-of, long-looked-for stove-pipe!  The Anadyr River party was found.

The unexpected discovery, at midnight, of this party of countrymen, when we had just given up all hope of shelter, and almost of life, was a God-send to our disheartened spirits, and I hardly knew in my excitement what I did.  I remember now walking hastily back and forth in front of the snow-drift, repeating softly to myself at every step, “Thank God!” “Thank God!” but at the time