that the man understood me and halted with his heavy boots about two
inches above my face. Clinging to the side ropes and watching my
opportunity, I jumped at the right moment and happily hit the boat.
The Cossack jumped into the lap of a sailor and received a variety of
epithets for his carelessness. There are fourteen ways in the Russian
language of calling a man a ---- fool, and I think all of them were
used.

[Illustration: ASCENDING THE BAY.]

Wind and tide opposed each other and tossed us rather uncomfortably.
The waves breaking over the bow saturated the Cossack and sprinkled
some of the sailors. At the stern we managed to protect ourselves,
though we caught occasionally a few drops of spray. Wrapped in my
overcoat and holding a bear-skin on my knees, I studied the summer
night in that high northern latitude. At midnight it seemed like day
break, and I half imagined we had wrongly calculated the hours and
were later than we supposed. Between sunset and sunrise the twilight
crept along the horizon from Occident to Orient. Further north the
inhabitants of the Arctic circle were enjoying the light of their long
summer day. What a contrast to the bleak night of cold and darkness
that stretches with faint glimmerings of dawn through nearly half the
year. The shores of the bay were high perpendicular banks, sharply
cut like the bluffs at Vicksburg. There are several head-lands, but
none project far enough to form harbors behind them. The bottom
furnishes good anchoring ground, but the bay is quite open to
southerly winds.

Captain Lund dropped his chin to his breast and slept soundly.
Anossoff raised his coat collar and drew in his head like a tortoise