454 
“OLD FRYBARK.” 
about three hundred, perhaps more, — looking as if he was 
all flesh, hut feeling as if he was all iron, and carrying his 
weight with a light, firm step, while the drops of exertion 
rolled from his heated brow. As we walked along the 
broken edge of a dry watercourse, he uncovered his head 
and fanned himself with his broad-brimmed Panama hat, 
until I buttoned my pea-jacket closer around me and 
shivered before the disturbed air. 
“Why, my good sir, you button your coat; you are 
cold ? We find it very warm to-day.” And, sure enough, 
when we reached his house we found the windows and 
doors all open, though we had left the thermometer at 
forty degrees on shipboard, and that, too, before the set- 
ting sun had left the air without his warming rays. 
“Yes, Mr. Freighburg, it is quite cool for us,” re- 
marked one of the party: “we find our coats quite com- 
fortable.” 
“Ah, yes! quite cool. Well, we want ‘twenty drops:* 
they will warm us.” 
And, “suiting the action to the word,” he brought out 
one of the largest gin-bottles I ever saw, filled a dozen or 
more large wine-glasses, and, drinking oiF one, — “to test 
its quality,” as ho observed, — took up another, and, mo- 
tioning us to do likewise, continued: — 
“Well, now then! we drink to Russia and America, 
— always friends!” 
We drank the toast with as little of wry in our faces 
as possible, and, with a choking sensation about the 
throat, lit cigars and walked out to see “ Ayan.** 
We found it composed of some fifty or sixty log-houses, 
most compactly i:>ut together, to guard against the exces- 
