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306 thus convince him that we were not only good fellows, but men of rare sagacity and judgment—as of course we were! We made it a rule to call in evening dress upon every official, as a means of showing him our respectful appreciation of his rank and position; we drank vódka and bitter cordial with him—if necessary, up to the limit of double vision; we made ourselves agreeable to his wife, and Mr. Frost drew portraits of his children; and, in nine cases out of ten, we thus succeeded in making ourselves "solid with the administration" before we had been in a town or village forty-eight hours.

The next steps in our plan of campaign were, first, to forestall suspicion in the minds of the subordinate police, by showing ourselves publicly as often as possible in the company of their superiors; and, secondly, to supply the people of the village with a plausible explanation of our presence there by making visits to schools, by ostentatiously taking notes in sight of the scholars, and by getting the teachers to prepare for us statistics of popular education. This part of the work generally fell to me, while Mr. Frost attracted public attention by sketching in the streets, by collecting flowers and butterflies, or by lecturing to station-masters and peasants upon geography, cosmography, and the phenomena of the heavens. This last-mentioned occupation afforded him great amusement, and proved at the same time to be extremely useful as a means of giving a safe direction to popular speculations concerning us. Jointly I think we produced upon the public mind the impression that we had come to Siberia with what is known in Russia as an uchónni tsel [a scientific aim], and that we were chiefly interested in popular education, art, botany, geography, and archaeology. After we had thus forestalled suspicion by calling promptly upon the police, and by furnishing the common people with a ready-made theory to explain our presence and our movements, we could go where we liked without exciting much remark, and we