I exchanged my trunk for a chemadan of enormous capacity, and long enough to extend across the bottom, of my sleigh.  For the first thousand versts, to Krasnoyarsk, I arranged to travel with a young officer of engineers whose baggage consisted of two or three hundred pounds of geological specimens.  For provisions we ordered beef, cabbage soup, little cakes like ‘mince turnovers,’ and a few other articles.  Tea and sugar were indispensable, and had a prominent place.  Our soups, meat, pies, et cetera were frozen and only needed thawing at the stations to be ready for use.

The day before my departure was the peculiar property of Saint Inakentief, the only saint who belongs especially to Siberia.  Everybody kept the occasion in full earnest, the services commencing the previous evening when nearly everybody got drunk.  I had a variety of preparations in the shape of mending, making bags, tying up bundles and the like, but though I offered liberal compensation neither man-servant nor maid-servant would lend assistance.  Labor was not to be had on any terms, and I was obliged to do my own packing.  There are certain saints’ days in the year when a Russian peasant will no more work than would a Puritan on Sunday.  All who could do so on the day above mentioned visited the church four miles from Irkutsk, where Saint Inakentief lies buried.

I occupied the fashionable hours of the two days before my departure in making farewell visits according to Russian etiquette.  Not satisfied with their previous courtesy my friends arranged a dinner at the club rooms for the last evening of my stay at Irkutsk.  The other public dinners were of a masculine character, but the farewell entertainment possessed the charm of the presence of fifteen or twenty ladies.  General Shelashnikoff, Governor of Irkutsk, and acting Governor General during the absence of General Korsackoff, presided at the table.  We dined directly before the portraits of the last and present emperors of Russia, and as I looked at the likeness of Nicholas I thought I had never seen it half as amiable.

After the dinner the tables disappeared with magical rapidity and a dance began.  While I was talking in a corner behind a table, a large album containing views of Irkutsk was presented to me as a souvenir of my visit.  The golovah was prominent in the presentation, and when it was ended he urged me to be his vis a vis in a quadrille.  Had he asked me to walk a tight rope or interpret a passage of Sanscrit, I should have been about as able to comply.  My education in ’the light fantastic’ has been extremely limited, and my acquaintances will testify that nature has not adapted me to achievements in the Terpsichorean art.

I resisted all entreaties to join the dance up to that evening.  I urged that I never attempted it a dozen times in my life, and not at all within ten years.  The golovah declared he had not danced in twenty-five years, and knew as little of the art as I did.  There was no more to be said.  I resigned myself to the pleasures awaiting me, and ventured on the floor very much as an elephant goes on a newly frozen mill-pond.  Personal diffidence and a regard for truth forbid a laudatory account of my success.  I did walk through a quadrille, but when it came to the Mazurka I was as much out of place as a blind man in a picture gallery.