My voice seemed to the astounded Americans inside to come out of the stove--a phenomenon which was utterly unparalleled in all their previous experience; but they reasoned very correctly that any stove which could ask in good English for the door in the middle of the night had an indubitable right to be answered; and they replied in a hesitating and half-frightened tone that the door was "on the south-east corner." This left us about as wise as before. In the first place we did not know which way south-east was, and in the second a snow-drift could not properly be described as having a corner. I started around the stove-pipe, however, in a circle, with the hope of finding some sort of an entrance. The inmates had dug a deep ditch or trench about thirty feet in length for a doorway, and had covered it over with sticks and reindeerskins to keep out the drifting snow. Stepping incautiously upon this frail roof I fell through just as one of the startled men was coming out in his shirt and drawers, holding a candle above his head, and peering through the darkness of the tunnel to see who would enter. The sudden descent through the roof of such an apparition as I knew myself to be, was not calculated to restore the steadiness of startled nerves. I had on two heavy _kukhlankas_ which swelled out my figure to gigantic proportions; two thick reindeerskin hoods with long frosty fringes of black bearskin were pulled up over my head, a squirrelskin mask frozen into a sheet of ice concealed my face, and nothing but the eyes peering out through tangled masses of frosty hair showed that the furs contained a human being. The man took two or three frightened steps backward and nearly dropped his candle. I came in such a "questionable shape" that he might well demand "whether my intents were wicked or charitable!" As I recognised his face, however, and addressed him again in English, he stopped; and tearing off my mask and fur hoods I spoke my name. Never was there such rejoicing as that which then took place in that little underground cellar, as I recognised in the exiled party two of my old comrades and friends, to whom eight months before I had bid good-bye, as the _Olga_ sailed out of the Golden Gate of San Francisco. I little thought when I shook hands with Harder and Robinson then, that I should next meet them at midnight, in a little snow-covered cellar, on the great lonely steppes of the lower Anadyr. As soon as we had taken off our heavy furs and seated ourselves beside a warm fire, we began to feel the sudden reaction which necessarily followed twenty-four hours of such exposure, suffering, and anxiety. Our overstrained nerves gave way all at once, and in ten minutes I could hardly raise a cup of coffee to my lips. Ashamed of such womanish weakness, I tried to conceal it from the Americans, and I presume they do not know to this day that Dodd and I nearly fainted several times within the first