At Tyumen I bought some sausage for the journey, but what sausage! When you take a bit in your mouth there’s a sniff as though you had gone into a stable at the very moment when the coachmen were taking off their leg-wrappers; when you begin chewing it, you feel as though you had fastened your teeth into a dog’s tail defiled with pitch. Tfoo! I ate some once or twice, and threw it away. I have had one telegram and the letter from you in which you write that you want to bring out an encyclopaedic dictionary. I don’t know why, but the news of that dictionary rejoiced me greatly. Do, my dear friend! If I am any use for working on it, I will devote November and December to you, and will spend those months in Petersburg. I will sit at it from morning till night. I made a fair copy of my notes at Tomsk in horrid hotel surroundings, but I took trouble about it and was not without a desire to please you. I thought, he must be bored and hot in Feodosia, let him read about the cold. These notes will come to you instead of a letter which has been taking shape in my head during the whole journey. In return you must send to me at Sahalin all your critical reviews except the first two, which I have read; have Peshel’s “Ethnology” sent me there too, except the first two instalments, which I have already. The post to Sahalin goes both by sea and across Siberia, so if people write to me I shall get letters often. Don’t lose my address--_Island of Sahalin, Alexandrovsky Post_. Oh, the expense! _Gewalt!_ Thanks to the floods, I had to pay the drivers double and almost treble, for it has been fiendishly hard work. My trunk, a very charming article, has turned out unsuitable for the journey; it takes a lot of room, pokes one in the ribs, and rattles, and worst of all threatens to burst open. “Don’t take boxes on long journeys!” good people said to me, but I remembered this advice only when I had gone half-way. Well, I am leaving my trunk to reside permanently at Tomsk, and am buying instead of it a sort of leather carcase, which has the advantage that it can be tied so as to form two halves at the bottom of the chaise as one likes. I paid sixteen roubles for it. Next point. To travel to the Amur, changing one’s conveyance at every station, is torture. You shatter both yourself and all your luggage. I was advised to buy a trap. I bought one to-day for one hundred and thirty roubles. If I don’t succeed in selling it at Sryetensk, where my horse journey ends, I shall be in a fix and shall howl aloud. To-day I dined with the editor of the _Sibirsky Vyestnik_, a local Nozdryov, a broad nature.... He drank to the tune of six roubles. Stop! They announce that the deputy police master wants to see me. What can it be?!?