The name of Kamchatka is generally associated with snow-fields, glaciers, frozen mountains, and ice-bound shores.

Its winters are long and severe; snow falls to a great depth, and ice attains a thickness proportioned to the climate.

But the summers, though short, are sufficiently hot to make up for the cold of winter.

Vegetation is wonderfully rapid, the grasses, trees and plants growing as much in a hundred days as in six months of a New England summer.

Hardly has the snow disappeared before the trees put forth their buds and blossoms, and the hillsides are in all the verdure of an American spring.