movements, and clean, elastic limbs, and felt, instinctively, that what we most value in every man, above even culture or genius, is the stamp of sex,—­the asserting, self-reliant, conquering air which marks the male animal.  Wide-awake men (and women, too) who know what this element is, and means, will agree with me, and prefer the sharp twang of true fibre to the most exquisite softness and sweetness that were ever produced by sham refinement.

After some fifteen or twenty miles from the island, we approached the rocky archipelago in which the lake terminates at its northern end,—­a gradual transition from water to land.  Masses of gray granite, wooded wherever the hardy Northern firs could strike root, rose on all sides, divided by deep and narrow channels.  “This is the scheer,” said our captain, using a word which recalled to my mind, at once, the Swedish skaer, and the English skerry, used alike to denote a coast-group of rocky islets.  The rock encroached more and more as we advanced; and finally, as if sure of its victory over the lake, gave place, here and there, to levels of turf, gardens, and cottages.  Then followed a calm, land-locked basin, surrounded with harvest-fields, and the spire of Serdopol arose before us.

Of this town I may report that it is called, in Finnish, Sordovala, and was founded about the year 1640.  Its history has no doubt been very important to its inhabitants, but I do not presume that it would be interesting to the world, and therefore spare myself a great deal of laborious research.  Small as it is, and so secluded that Ladoga seems a world’s highway in comparison with its quiet harbor, it nevertheless holds three races and three languages in its modest bounds.  The government and Its tongue are Russian; the people are mostly Finnish, with a very thin upper-crust of Swedish tradition, whence the latter language is cultivated as a sign of aristocracy.

We landed on a broad wooden pier, and entered the town through a crowd which was composed of all these elements.  There was to be a fair on the morrow, and from the northern shore of the lake, as well as the wild inland region towards the Saima, the people had collected for trade, gossip, and festivity.  Children in ragged garments of hemp, bleached upon their bodies, impudently begged for pocket-money; women in scarlet kerchiefs curiously scrutinized us; peasants carried bundles of freshly mown grass to the horses which were exposed for sale; ladies with Hungarian hats crushed their crinolines into queer old cabriolets; gentlemen with business-faces and an aspect of wealth smoked paper cigars; and numbers of hucksters offered baskets of biscuit and cakes, of a disagreeable yellow color and great apparent toughness.  It was a repetition, with slight variations, of a village-fair anywhere else, or an election-day in America.