with a heavy heart. From that time forward I was never free from anxiety about it. That package contained all the results of my Siberian work, and its loss would have been simply irreparable. As week after week passed, and I heard nothing about it, I was strongly tempted to telegraph my friend and find out whether it had reached him; but I knew that such a telegram might increase the risk, and I refrained.
On many accounts we were more reluctant to leave Minusínsk than any other town at which we had stopped on our homeward way, but as a distance of 3000 miles still lay between us and St. Petersburg, and as we were anxious to reach European Russia, if possible, before the breaking up of the winter roads, it was time for us to resume our journey. Thursday, February 4th, we made farewell calls upon the political exiles, as well as upon Mr. Martiánof, Mr. Safiánof, and Dr. Malínin, who had been particularly kind to us, and set out with a tróika of "free" horses for the city of Tomsk, distant 475 miles. Instead of following the Yeniséi River back to Krasnoyársk, which would have been going far out of our wav, we decided to leave it a short distance below Minusínsk and proceed directly to Tomsk by a short cut across the steppes, keeping the great Siberian road on our right all the way. Nothing of interest happened to us until late in the evening, when, just as we were turning up from the river into a small peasant village, the name of which I have now forgotten, both we and our horses were startled by the sudden appearance of a wild-looking man in a long, tattered sheepskin coat, who, from the shelter of a projecting cliff, sprang into the road ahead of us, shouting a hoarse but unintelligible warning, and brandishing in the air an armful of blazing birch-bark and straw.
"What 's the matter?" I said to our driver, as our horses recoiled in affright.
"It 's the plague-guard," he replied. "He says we must be smoked."
The cattle-plague was then prevailing extensively in the
