at all.  The disappearance of snow and the appearance of vegetation are almost simultaneous; and although the tundras or moss steppes, continue for some time to hold water like a saturated sponge, they are covered with flowers and blossoming blueberry bushes, and show no traces of the long, cold winter which has so recently ended.  In less than a month after the disappearance of snow in 1860, I collected from one high plain about five acres in extent, near the mouth of the Gizhiga River, more than sixty species of flowers.  Animal life of all kinds is equally prompt in making its appearance.  Long before the ice is out of the gulfs and bays along the coast, migratory birds begin to come in from the sea in immense numbers.  Innumerable species of ducks, geese, and swans—­many of them unknown to the American ornithologist—­swarm about every little pool of water in the valleys and upon the lower plains; gulls, fish-hawks, and eagles, keep up a continual screaming about the mouths of the numerous rivers; and the rocky precipitous coast of the sea is literally alive with countless millions of red-beaked puffin or sea-parrots, which build their nests in the crevices and upon the ledges of the most inaccessible cliffs, and at the report of a pistol fly in clouds which fairly darken the air.  Besides these predatory and aquatic birds, there are many others which are not so gregarious in their habits, and which, consequently, attract less notice.  Among these are the common barn and chimney swallows, crows, ravens, magpies, thrushes, plover, ptarmigan, and a kind of grouse known to the Russians as “teteref.”  Only one singing-bird, as far as I know, is to be found in the country, and that is a species of small ground-sparrow which frequents the drier and more grassy plains in the vicinity of the Russian settlements.

The village of Gizhiga, where we had temporarily established our headquarters, was a small settlement of perhaps fifty or sixty plain log houses, situated upon the left bank of the Gizhiga River, eight or ten miles from the gulf.  It was at that time one of the most important and flourishing settlements upon the coast of the Okhotsk Sea, and controlled all the trade of north-eastern Siberia as far north at the Anadyr and as far west as the village of Okhotsk.  It was the residence of a local governor, the headquarters of four or five Russian merchants, and was visited annually by a government supply steamer, and several trading vessels belonging to wealthy American houses.  Its population consisted principally of Siberian Cossacks and the descendants of compulsory emigrants from Russia proper, who had received their freedom as compensation for forcible expatriation.  Like all other settled inhabitants of Siberia and Kamchatka, they depended for their subsistence principally upon fish; but as the country abounded in game, and the climate and soil in the valley of the Gizhiga River permitted the cultivation of the hardier kinds of garden vegetables,