“While I was constantly occupying him, the wife was busy sewing Samoïede dresses, and sometimes assisted her husband in his translations. I often heard her sighing deeply, and having asked for the reason, she burst into tears, and answered that she grieved for her husband, who was thus imprisoned in a room. ‘Thy husband,’ was my reply, ‘is not worse off than thyself. Tell me, what do you think of your own position?’ ‘I do not think of myself--I am sorrowful for my husband,’ was her ingenuous reply. At length both the husband and the wife begged me so earnestly to set them at liberty that I allowed them to depart.” On the way from Pjoscha to Pustosersk, after Castrén had once more vainly endeavored to discover that _rara avis_, a Samoïede teacher, he became thoroughly acquainted with the January snow-storms of the tundra: “The wind arose about noon, and blew so violently that we could not see the reindeer before our sledges. The roof of my vehicle, which at first had afforded me some protection, was soon carried away by the gale. Anxious about my fate, I questioned my guides, whenever they stopped to brush off the snow which had accumulated upon me, and received the invariable answer, ‘We do not know where we are, and see nothing.’ We proceeded step by step, now following one direction, now another, until at length we reached a river well known to the guides. The leader of the first sledge hurried his reindeer down the precipitous bank, and drove away upon the ice to seek a more convenient descent; but as he did not return, the other guide likewise left me to look after his companion, and thus I was kept waiting for several hours on the tundra, without knowing where my guides had gone to. “At first I did not even know that they had left me, and when I became aware of the fact, I thought that they had abandoned me to my fate. I will not attempt to describe my sensations; but my bodily condition was such, that when the cold increased with the approach of night, I was seized with a violent fever. I thought my last hour was come, and prepared for my journey to another world.” The re-appearance of the guides relieved Castrén of his anxiety, and when the little party reached some Samoïede huts, the eldest of the guides knelt down at the side of our traveller’s sledge and expressed his joy in a prayer to God, begging Castrén to join him in his thanksgivings, “for He, and not I, has this night saved thee.”