The next day I started in to return their calls. It is an insult not to taste every dish on the table of your host, and the result was that I soon reached my utmost capacity. In the evening, I dined with Mrs. Braggin, and afterward the room was cleared, and the whole village came in for a dance. For music, we had a piano, an accordion, and a violin; the last was played by an old Russian, who knew sixteen bars of a single tune, and repeated it over and over, _ad nauseam_. In this primitive fashion, we made merry till the morning. The dance was a curious kind of quadrille, in which the men did almost all the dancing. The ladies stood at the corners, and the men in the center. The men danced very energetically, with many steps that resemble the "bucking" and "winging" of the negro in the United States. At the same time, they shouted at the top of their voices. As for the women, they merely moved forward and back, with little mincing steps, and then turned around in their places. All this time the samovar was going full blast, and every one was streaming with perspiration. [Illustration: Reindeer.] About midnight, the fun grew fast and furious, and every one started in to kiss and hug his neighbor; for by this time, more than half were intoxicated. The worst feature of such a Russian festive occasion is, that every one grows fearfully affectionate as he begins to feel the effect of the liquor. When the Christmas festivities were over, I made preparations to carry out a more extensive plan of exploration. It was my purpose to examine the valleys of the rivers running from the Stanovoi range of mountains into Bering Sea; the beaches along the shore of that sea, and then to turn south to Baron Koff Bay, on the eastern coast of Kamchatka, where sulphur deposits were said to have been found; then across the neck of the Kamchatka Peninsula to Cape Memaitch, and around the head of the Okhotsk Sea to Ghijiga, my starting-point. This trip was in the form of a rough circle, and the total distance, including excursions, proved to be upward of twenty-five hundred miles. This distance I had to cover between January 15 and May 15, when the road would no longer be passable for sledges.