ground I felt perfectly at home; and I was succeeding, as I thought, admirably, when the girl suddenly blushed, looked a trifle shocked, and then bit her lip in a manifest effort to restrain a smile of amusement not warranted by anything in the life that I was trying to describe.  She was soon afterward carried away by a young Cossack officer who asked her to dance, and I was promptly engaged in conversation by another lady, who also wanted “to hear an American talk Russian.”  My self-confidence had been a little shaken by the blush and the amused smile of my previous auditor, but I rallied my intellectual forces, took a firm grip of my Russian vocabulary, and, as Price would say, “sailed in.”  But I soon struck another snag.  This young woman, too, began to show symptoms of shock, which, in her case, took the form of amazement.  I was absolutely sure that there was nothing in the subject-matter of my remarks to bring a blush to the cheek of innocence, or give a shock to the virgin mind of feminine youth, and yet it was perfectly evident that there was something wrong.  As soon as I could make my escape, I went to General Kukel and said:  “Will you please tell me, Your Excellency, what’s the matter with my Russian?”

“What makes you think there’s anything the matter with it?” he replied evasively, but with a twinkle of amusement in his eyes.

“It doesn’t seem to go very well,” I said, “in conversation with women.  They appear to understand it all right, but it gives them a shock.  Is my pronunciation so horribly bad?”

“You speak Russian,” he said, “with quite extraordinary fluency, and with a-a-really interesting and engaging accent; but—­excuse me please—­shall I be entirely frank?  You see you have learned the language, under many disadvantages, among the Koraks, Cossacks, and Chukchis of Kamchatka and the Okhotsk Sea coast, and—­quite innocently and naturally of course—­you have picked up a few words and expressions that are not—­well, not—­”

“Not used in polite society,” I suggested.

“Hardly so much as that,” he replied deprecatingly.  “They’re a little queer, that ’s all—­quaint—­bizarre—­but it’s nothing! nothing at all!  All you need is a little study of good models—­books, you know—­and a few months of city life.”

“That settles it!” I said.  “I talk no more Russian to ladies in Irkutsk.”

When, upon my arrival in St. Petersburg, I had an opportunity to study the language in books, and to hear it spoken by educated people, I found that the Russian I had picked up by Kamchatkan camp-fires and in Cossack izbas on the coast of the Okhotsk Sea resembled, in many respects, the English that a Russian would acquire in a Colorado mining camp, or among the cowboys in Montana.  It was fluent, but, as General Kukel said, “quaint—­bizarre,” and, at times, exceedingly profane.