and smiles at the
people who call it cold and its distances big. Honnell has lived in
Edinburgh, so doesn't notice the temperature, though he misses the
tramway system. Both can say about six words--the same--in Russian, and
both have bought a pair of moccasins--Swan because he likes them, and
Honnell because he would like to.

Recently they set off together from Kola on the Murman Coast to try to
find a village from which jolly little Laplanders and Laplanderesses
come sliding and skidding to market behind their stout-hearted reindeer.
They left all their picturesque Arctic gear behind them except their
moccasins, Swan being one of those trying people who don't care how they
look, if only they "mush" along fast enough. Their provisions consisted
of a tin of bully and four edible tiles or army biscuits, with some
margarine in a Y.M.C.A. envelope.

The story they told on their return--for they did return and in good
time for dinner--was mostly Honnell's, but I must admit that Swan could
not be got to refute it. As they approached the village--some huts on a
white hillside above a frozen lake--a representative of the dog-colony
came to meet them, waving his tail with an anti-clockwise circular
motion impossible to the dog of temperate zones. Having inspected
them he escorted them on their way in a perfectly civilised and even
courteous manner.

So far from being resisted, their entry was ignored save by the little
fur-capped boys, who collected at their heels as if they had formed the
vanguard of a circus, and the little brightly-kerchiefed girls, who
bolted for cover. All the adult male inhabitants, fiercely-bearded
little men like trolls done up in reindeer-skin from top to toe,
appeared to be engrossed in the manufacture of sleighs, although the
village was already littered and cluttered up with them; and all the
ladies were indoors sewing reindeer-skin into trousers or making tea.

Having exchanged a noise like "_Sdrastetye_" (which in these parts seems
to mean "_Bon jour_") with everybody they saw, our two friends sat on a
log, and rested, while Honnell set about sketching, as he calls it, the
primitive wooden church. The little boys, of course, formed a sort of
pyramid on his shoulders to watch. Whether because his fingers were cold
and so not completely under his control, or because the vibrations of
the human pyramid communicated to his pencil some lucky jerks, the marks
Honnell committed to (or on) his note-