l warrant you can. Your breakfast was probably of the roughest."

"It was," Godfrey admitted. "I have not eaten a piece of real bread for
more than a year. We haven't had much of anything made of flour since we
started in the canoe in June; but one gets to do without bread very
well."

"I have not asked you your name yet," the trader said.

"It is Godfrey Bullen. My father is head of a firm in London that does a
good deal of trade with Russia. He was Living in St. Petersburg a good
many years. That is how it is that I speak the language."

"I was wondering how it was that you spoke it so well. Now, then, let me
introduce you to my wife and family. This is an English gentleman,
wife," he said in his own language to a pleasant-looking lady. "He does
not look like it, but when I tell you that he has made his escape from
Siberia in a canoe it will account for it."

Godfrey found that his early meal had in no way abated his appetite. The
breakfast was an excellent one, but he confined himself to bread and
butter, and thought he had never tasted anything so good in his life. He
learned that his host was an importer of goods of all kinds, and did the
principal trade at Vadsoe, besides supplying all the villages on the
fiord.

"If you had been here a few days earlier," he said, "you would have
found a countryman of yours, a Mr. Clarke, who almost monopolizes the
whaling trade here. He owns three steamers, and has a great melting-down
establishment. I myself send great quantities of cod to Hamburg by
steamer. Most of the boats here work for me."

After breakfast Godfrey gave his host a sketch of his adventures.

"It has been a wonderful journey," his host said when he concluded. "I
have heard of one or two cases where men have made their way to
Archangel, and thence by land to our frontier, but I never heard of
anyone attempting it by sea before. It was a perilous journey indeed,
and required a knowledge of canoeing, which no Russian prisoner would be
likely to have. Then you were certainly fortunate in having a companion
with you who was at home with those Ostjaks. Still, as you brought him
with you for that purpose, that was forethought rather than luck."

"Which is the first port at which the steamer will stop that I can send
a telegram from?"

The merchant laughed. "If you go down-stairs into the office, and go
through the door to your left hand, you will find yourself in a
telegraph office."

"Really?"

"Yes,