I agreed with the spirit if not with the construction of this comment. A careful survey of the situation, as visible through my binoculars, from the bridge of the _France_ suggested the possibility that the irresponsible population had all gone into the interior to have an agrarian riot or celebrate in some other simple way dear to the Russian heart. Nevertheless, we had not come all this distance and spent three cheerless soaking nights at sea to give up the game at the first sign of discouragement. Here was where the dispatches of his Britannic Majesty came to the rescue. After an elaborate search through the International Signal Code I found a combination of flags which exactly filled our needs, and promptly hoisted to our single halyard the colored bunting of the code which stood for the letters “J. & S.” This means “I am carrying government dispatches,” and implies that everything in sight should co-operate at once. The effect was even better than I had anticipated. A few minutes after our flags had been snapping in the icy wind that blew in from the Black Sea I saw the launch of the quarantine doctor come puffing out from behind some tugboats, where it had been lying in ambush. The doctor himself was standing in the bow. He was a portly man, and willing hands were necessary to assist him up the side of the _France_. He was one of those foreigners who cherish that most regrettable of ideas, namely, that he could speak English. The result was that he flatly declined to be addressed in any other language. This made it embarrassing and occasioned no end of delay as his English was of the purely school book brand. It contained such pertinent phrases as “How is your wife’s brother? Will you go for a walk in the park to-day? Has your sister’s husband a good pen?” and so on. This was all right, as far as it went, but did not assist me much in the business in hand. He seemed to be wholly unprepared in his vocabulary to take care of such a commonplace and uninteresting subject as a health examination. He held me on deck in the cold while he ran through his available list of sentences, which really gave him an excellent insight into the status of my family, the number of my brothers and sisters and their respective ages. He followed this with a few irrelevant questions about the weather, and ended up with “Do you find Russia a pleasant country?” This seemed to be the last sentence which had stuck in his head. After that he paused for breath, and before he could commence again I got him down into my saloon where we had just been having breakfast. When he saw the table he forgot all about his English aspirations and burst into French, and, with tears in his eyes and a wealth of exclamation, told us how hungry he was. We offered the remnants of the breakfast and he fell on the food with an avidity which was appalling. The remnants went fast and we had to send a rush order to Stomati in the galley for reinforcements. He ate fast and well.