DAY AND NIGHT IN ALASKA. 121 
our modern apartment hotels, and were occupied in this 
way by well-to-do families, both comfort and self-protec- 
tion being gained. The walls of the house were painted 
red, and the roof was covered with sheets of iron of a 
dingy yellow. 
Flossie was delighted with her room, which opened 
into her mother's. She declared, as she tried one antique 
piece of Russian furniture after another, that she almost 
wished she was going to stay in Sitka, which promised so 
many surprising walks, funny customs among the native 
inhabitants, and genuinely interesting antiquities. Flor- 
ence was an ardent lover of history at school, and had 
taken pains during the winter to book herself up thor- 
oughly on the story of Russian America, from the time 
when the first Russian explorers visited its wild shores, 
in 1742, through the history of the oppressed Indians, the 
massacres and wars, the greedy incursions of the fur- 
hunters, to the year 1867, when the whole territory now 
known as Alaska was sold to the United States for 
$7,200,000, and garrisoned by United States troops. 
There was already a custom-house officer at New 
Archangel, or Sitka, as it had come to be called from the 
Indian name. 
So Flossie was eager to verify her studies, and as she 
skipped over the polished plank floor of her room, back 
and forth from the deep window-seats to the old mahog- 
any sofa and the wild-goat skin rug before the fireplace, 
she did long to see the castle of Baronov, and the tin- 
