I was not the only person in Irkutsk, however, whose vocabulary was peculiar and whose diction was “quaint” and “bizarre.”  A day or two after the ball of the Blagorodnaya Sobrania we received a call from a young Russian telegraph operator who had heard of our arrival and who wished to pay his respects to us as brother telegraphers from America.  I greeted him cordially in Russian; but he began, at once, to speak English, and said that he would prefer to speak that language, for the sake of practice.  His pronunciation, although queer, was fairly intelligible, and I had little difficulty in understanding him; but his talk had a strange, mediaeval flavour, due, apparently, to the use of obsolete idioms and words.  In the course of half an hour, I became satisfied that he was talking the English of the fifteenth century—­the English of Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Fletcher—­but how he had learned such English, in the nineteenth century and in the capital of eastern Siberia, I could not imagine.  I finally asked him how he had managed to get such command of the language in a city where, so far as I knew, there was no English teacher.  He replied that the Russian Government required of its telegraph operators a knowledge of Russian and French, and then added two hundred and fifty rubles a year to their salaries for every additional language that they learned.  He wanted the two hundred and fifty rubles, so he began the study of English with a small English-French dictionary and an old copy of Shakespeare.  He got some help in acquiring the pronunciation from educated Polish exiles, and from foreigners whom he occasionally met, but, in the main, he had learned the language alone, and by committing to memory dialogues from Shakespeare’s plays.  I described to him my recent experience with Russian, and told him that his method was, unquestionably, better than mine.  He had learned English from the greatest master of the language that ever lived; while I had picked up my Russian from Cossack dog-drivers and illiterate Kamchadals.  He could talk to young women in the eloquent and impassioned words of Romeo, while my language was fit for backwoodsmen only.

At the end of our first week in Irkutsk, we were ready to resume our journey; but we had no money with which to pay our hotel bill, still less our travelling expenses.  I had telegraphed to Major Abaza repeatedly for funds, but had received no reply, and I was finally compelled to go, in humiliation of spirit, to Governor General Shelashnikoff, and borrow five hundred rubles.

On the 13th of December, we were again posting furiously along the Great Siberian Road, past caravans, of tea from Hankow; detachments of Cossacks convoying gold from the placers of the Lena; parties of hard-labour convicts on their way to the mines of the trans-Baikal; and hundreds of sleighs loaded with the products or manufactures of Russia, Siberia, and the Far East.