Meteors are flying in my cabin--these are luminous beetles that look like electric sparks. Wild goats swim across the Amur in the day-time. The flies here are huge. I am sharing my cabin with a Chinaman--Son-Luli--who is constantly telling me how in China for the merest trifle it is “off with his head.” Last night he got drunk with opium, and was talking in his sleep all night and preventing me from sleeping. On the 27th I walked about the Chinese town Aigun. Little by little I seem gradually to be stepping into a fantastic world. The steamer rocks, it is hard to write. To-morrow I shall reach Habarovsk. The Chinaman began to sing from music written on his fan. TELEGRAM TO HIS MOTHER. SAHALIN, July 11, 1890. Arrived well, telegraph Sahalin.--CHEKHOV. TELEGRAM TO HIS MOTHER. SAHALIN, September 27, 1890. Well. Shall arrive shortly.--CHEKHOV. TO A. S. SUVORIN. THE STEAMER “BAIKAL,” September 11, 1890. Greetings! I am sailing on the Gulf of Tartary from the north of Sahalin to the south. I am writing; and don’t know when this letter will reach you. I am well, though I see on all sides glaring at me the green eyes of cholera which has laid a trap for me. In Vladivostok, in Japan, in Shanghai, Tchifu, Suez, and even in the moon, I fancy--everywhere there is cholera, everywhere quarantine and terror.... They expect the cholera in Sahalin and keep all vessels in quarantine. In short, it is a bad lookout. Europeans are dying at Vladivostok, among others the wife of a general has died. I have spent just two months in the north of Sahalin. I was received by the local administration very amicably, though Galkin had not written a single word about me. Neither Galkin nor the Baroness V., nor any of the other genii I was so foolish as to appeal to for help, turned out of the slightest use to me; I had to act on my own initiative. The Sahalin general, Kononovitch, is a cultivated and gentlemanly man. We soon got on together, and everything went off well. I am bringing some papers with me from which you will see that I was put on the most agreeable footing from the first. I have seen _everything_, so that the question is not now _what_ I have seen, but how I have seen it. I don’t know what will come of it, but I have done a good deal. I have got enough material for three dissertations. I got up every morning at five o’clock and went to bed late; and all day long was on the strain from the thought that there was still so much I hadn’t done; and now that I have done with the convict system, I have the feeling that I have seen everything but have not noticed the elephants.