Harry Blount and Alcide Jolivet.

Jolivet, an optimist by nature, found everything agreeable, and as by chance both lodging and food were to his taste, he jotted down in his book some memoranda particularly favorable to the town of Nijni-Novgorod.

Blount, on the contrary, having in vain hunted for a supper, had been obliged to find a resting-place in the open air.

He therefore looked at it all from another point of view, and was preparing an article of the most withering character against a town in which the landlords of the inns refused to receive travelers who only begged leave to be flayed, "morally and physically." Michael Strogoff, one hand in his pocket, the other holding his cherry-stemmed pipe, appeared the most indifferent and least impatient of men; yet, from a certain contraction of his eyebrows every now and then, a careful observer would have seen that he was burning to be off.
For two hours he kept walking about the streets, only to find himself invariably at the fair again.

As he passed among the groups of buyers and sellers he discovered that those who came from countries on the confines of Asia manifested great uneasiness.