I was not conscious of anything except the great fact that we had found that party.  Dodd, who had been roused from his half-frozen lethargy by the strong excitement of the discovery, now suggested that we try to find the entrance to the house and get in as quickly, as possible, as he was nearly dead from cold and exhaustion.  There was no sound of life in the lonely snow-drift before us, and the inmates, if it had any, were evidently asleep.  Seeing no sign anywhere of a door, I walked up on the drift, and shouted down through the stove-pipe in tremendous tones, “Halloo the house!” A startled voice from under my feet demanded “Who’s there?”

“Come out and see!  Where’s the door?”

My voice seemed to the astounded Americans inside to come out of the stove—­a phenomenon which was utterly unparalleled in all their previous experience; but they reasoned very correctly that any stove which could ask in good English for the door in the middle of the night had an indubitable right to be answered; and they replied in a hesitating and half-frightened tone that the door was “on the south-east corner.”  This left us about as wise as before.  In the first place we did not know which way south-east was, and in the second a snow-drift could not properly be described as having a corner.  I started around the stove-pipe, however, in a circle, with the hope of finding some sort of an entrance.  The inmates had dug a deep ditch or trench about thirty feet in length for a doorway, and had covered it over with sticks and reindeerskins to keep out the drifting snow.  Stepping incautiously upon this frail roof I fell through just as one of the startled men was coming out in his shirt and drawers, holding a candle above his head, and peering through the darkness of the tunnel to see who would enter.  The sudden descent through the roof of such an apparition as I knew myself to be, was not calculated to restore the steadiness of startled nerves.  I had on two heavy kukhlankas which swelled out my figure to gigantic proportions; two thick reindeerskin hoods with long frosty fringes of black bearskin were pulled up over my head, a squirrelskin mask frozen into a sheet of ice concealed my face, and nothing but the eyes peering out through tangled masses of frosty hair showed that the furs contained a human being.  The man took two or three frightened steps backward and nearly dropped his candle.  I came in such a “questionable shape” that he might well demand “whether my intents were wicked or charitable!” As I recognised his face, however, and addressed him again in English, he stopped; and tearing off my mask and fur hoods I spoke my name.  Never was there such rejoicing as that which then took place in that little underground cellar, as I recognised in the exiled party two of my old comrades and friends, to whom eight months before I had bid good-bye, as the Olga sailed out of the Golden Gate of San Francisco.  I little thought when I shook hands with Harder and