Mr. Leántief seemed to me to compare favorably with any young men of my acquaintance.
At eight o'clock that evening Mr. Frost and I knocked at Mr. Lobonófski's door, and were promptly admitted and cordially welcomed. We found him living in a small log house not far from our hotel. The apartment into which we were shown, and which served in the double capacity of sitting-room and bed-room, was very small—not larger, I think, than ten feet in width by fourteen feet in length. Its log walls and board ceiling were covered with dingy whitewash, and its floor of rough unmatched planks was bare. Against a rude, unpainted partition to the right of the door stood a small single bedstead of stained wood, covered with neat but rather scanty bed-clothing, and in the corner beyond it was a triangular table, upon which were lying, among other books, Herbert Spencer's "Essays: Moral, Political, and Esthetic," and the same author's "Principles of Psychology." The opposite corner of the room was occupied by a what-not, or étagère, of domestic manufacture, upon the shelves of which were a few more books, a well-filled herbarium, of coarse brown wrapping-paper, an opera-glass, and an English New Testament. Between two small deeply set windows opening into the court-yard stood a large, unpainted wooden table, without a cloth, upon which was lying, open, the book that Mr. Lobonófski had been reading when we entered—a French translation of Balfour Stewart's "Conservation of Energy." There was no other furniture in the apartment except three or four unpainted wooden chairs. Everything was scrupulously neat and clean; but the room looked like the home of a man too poor to afford anything more than the barest essentials of life.
After Mr. Lobonófski had made a few preliminary inquiries with regard to the object of our journey to Siberia, and had expressed the pleasure which he said it afforded him to meet and welcome Americans in his own house, he turned
