at twenty-seven degrees below zero. As night came on, the intensity of the cold increased until it was all that we could do to endure it from one post-station to another. We drank three or four tumblers of hot tea every time we stopped to change horses; but in the long, lonely hours between midnight and morning, when we could get no warm food and when all our vital powers were usually at their lowest ebb, we suffered very severely. We had no difficulty in getting post-horses until just before dark Monday even- ing, when we reached the station of Turinopovorotnaya, about fifty miles from Chita, and found the whole village in a state of hilarious intoxication. Sleighs filled with young men and boys were careering hither and thither with wild whoops and halloos; long lines of peasant girls in bright- colored calico dresses were unsteadily promenading back and forth in the streets with their arms around one another and singing khórovód songs; the station-house was filled with flushed and excited people from neighboring settle- ments, who had evidently been participating in a celebra- tion of some kind and were about starting for their homes; the station-master, who perhaps had not finished his cele- bration, was nowhere to be found; there was not a driver about the stables; and the stárosta,1 a short, fat old man, who looked like a burgher from Amsterdam, was so drunk that even with the aid of a cane he could hardly stand on his feet. In vain we tried to ascertain the reasons for this surprising epidemic of inebriation. Nobody was sober enough to explain to us what had happened. From the excited and more or less incoherent conversation of the intoxicated travelers in the station-house, I learned that even the village priest was so drunk that he had to be taken home in a sleigh by the soberest of his parishioners. If the station-master, the stárosta, the village priest, the drivers, and all of the inhabitants were drunk, there was evidently no prospect of our being able to get horses. In fact we
1 A stárosta, or elder, is the head of a Siberian village.
