It proved to be the most delicate and savory repast
that had excited their appetites this side of Europe.
The friars had their consolations, and even Dona
Ignacia Arguello was less gastronomic than Father
Landaeta. Rezanov, whose epicurianism had sur-
vived a year of dried fish and the coarse luxuries
of his managers, suddenly saw all life in the light of
the humorist, and told so many amusing versions of
his adventures in the wilderness, and even of his
misadventure with Japan, that the priests choked
over their wine, and Langsdorff, who had not a
grain of humor, swelled with pride in his chance
relationship to a man who seemed able to manip-
ulate every string in the human network.

"He will succeed," he said to Davidov. "He will
succeed. I almost hoped he would not, he is so in-
different--I might almost say so hostile--to my
own scientific adventures. But when he is in this
mood, when those cold eyes brim with laughter and
ordinary humanity, I am nothing better than his
slave."

Rezanov, in reply to an entreaty from Father
Uria to tell them more of his mission and of the
strange picture-book country they had never hoped
to hear of at first hand, assumed a tone of great
frankness and intimacy. "We were, with astound-
ing cleverness, treated from the first like an audi-