necessary to keep from freezing. As a natural consequence, they were almost as fresh at night as they had been in the morning, and if they failed to find wood for a fire, or were compelled by some unforeseen exigency to travel throughout the twenty-four hours, they had the strength to do it. An inexperienced traveller under the same circumstances, would have exhausted all his energy during the day in trying to keep perfectly warm; and at night, wet with perspiration and tired out by too much violent exercise, he would almost inevitably have frozen to death. For two hours after supper, Dodd and I sat by the fire, trying experiments to see what the intense cold would do. About eight o'clock the heavens became suddenly overcast with clouds, and in less than an hour the thermometer had risen nearly thirty degrees. Congratulating ourselves upon this fortunate change in the weather, we crawled into our fur bags and slept away as much as we could of the long arctic night. Our life for the next few days was the same monotonous routine of riding, camping, and sleeping with which we were already so familiar. The country over which we passed was generally bleak, desolate, and uninteresting; the weather was cold enough for discomfort, but not enough so to make outdoor life dangerous or exciting; the days were only two or three hours in length and the nights were interminable. Going into camp early in the afternoon, when the sun disappeared, we had before us about twenty hours of darkness, in which we must either amuse ourselves in some way, or sleep. Twenty hours' sleep for any one but a Rip Van Winkle was rather an over-dose, and during at least half that time we could think of nothing better to do than sit around the camp-fire on bearskins and talk. Ever since leaving Petropavlovsk, talking had been our chief amusement; and although it had answered very well for the first hundred nights or so, it was now becoming a little monotonous and our mental resources were running decidedly low. We could not think of a single subject about which we knew anything that had not been talked over, criticised, and discussed to the very bone. We had related to each other in detail the whole history of our respective lives, together with the lives of all our ancestors as far back as we knew anything about them. We had discussed in full every known problem of Love, War, Science, Politics, and Religion, including a great many that we knew nothing whatever about, and had finally been reduced to such topics of conversation as the size of the army with which Xerxes invaded Greece and the probable extent of the Noachian deluge. As there was no possibility of arriving at any mutually satisfactory conclusion with regard to either of these important questions, the debate had been prolonged for twenty or thirty consecutive nights and the questions finally left open for future consideration. In cases of desperate emergency, when all other topics