They were columns of smoke, sixty or seventy feet in height, over the chimneys of Yakut farmhouses; and they stood so vertically in the cold, motionless air of the arctic night that they were lighted up, to their very summits, by the hearth-fires underneath.  As I stood looking at them, there came faintly to my ears the far-away lowing of cattle.  “Thank God!” I said to Malchanski, who at that moment rode up, “we are getting, at last, where they live in houses and keep cows!” No one can fully understand the pleasure that these columns of fire-lighted smoke gave us until he has ridden on dog- or reindeer-sledges, or walked on snowshoes, for twenty interminable days, through an arctic wilderness.  It seemed to me a year since our departure from Okhotsk; for weeks we had not taken off our heavy armour of furs; mirrors, beds and clean linen were traditions of the remote past; and American civilisation, as we looked back at it across twenty-seven months of barbarism, faded into the unreal imagery of a dream.  But the pillars of fire-lighted smoke and the lowing of domestic cattle were a promise of better things.

In less than two hours, we were sitting before the glowing fireplace of a comfortable Yakut house, with a soft carpet under our feet; real crockery cups of fragrant Kiakhta tea on a table beside us, and pictures on the wall over our heads.  The house, it is true, had slabs of ice for windows; the carpet was made of deerskins; and the pictures were only woodcuts from Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s; but to us, fresh from the smoky tents of the Tunguses, windows, carpets, and pictures, of any kind, were things to be wondered at and admired.

Between the Yakut settlements on the Aldan and the town of Yakutsk, there was a good post-road—­really a road; so, harnessing shaggy white Yakut ponies to our Okhotsk dog-sledges, we drove swiftly westward, to the unfamiliar music of Russian sleigh-bells, changing horses at every post-station and riding from fifteen to eighteen hours out of the twenty-four.

On the 16th of November, after twenty-three days of continuous travel, we reached Yakutsk; and there, in the house of a wealthy Russian merchant who threw his doors open to us with warm-hearted hospitality, we washed from our bodies the smoke and grime of Tunguse tents and yurts; put on clean, fresh clothes; ate a well cooked and daintily served supper; drank five tumblers of fragrant overland tea; smoked two Manila cheroots; and finally went to bed, excited but happy, in beds that were provided with hair mattresses, fleecy Russian blankets, and linen sheets.  The sensation of lying without furs and between sheets in a civilised bed was so novel and extraordinary that I lay awake for an hour, trying experiments with that wonderful mattress and luxuriously exploring, with bare feet, the smooth cool expanses of linen sheeting.

[Illustration:  Travelling Bag made of Reindeer skin]