Dear Reader - If you are willing to embark on this expedition to The White Sea Peninsula, I must ask you to regard the account of our journey simply as a sketch - as accurate as, under many difficulties, I have been able to make it. There appear to be two ways of writing: one, to seek after somebody else's style - the other to write as you talk yourself. The latter is all that lies within my capabilities, and it must be the excuse which you will require to make for many things in the following pages. An indifferent Russian scholar, I found it fatiguing to extort information word by word from the natives with whom we associated: and the result by no means represents the labour undergone.