clean, which is the very highest praise that can be
given to half-civilized as well as to civilized people.

They are a bold, energetic, and industrious race. Every hour of
weather fit for out-door work is spent in fishing and hunting, and
preparing food for the winter. In the light sledge, or on skates,
with nets and spears, they labored at each of these employments in
its season. Toward the end of the long winter, just as famine and
starvation threaten the whole population, a perfect cloud of swans,
and geese, and ducks, and snipes, pour in; and man and woman, boy and
girl, all rush forth to the hunt. The fish come in next, as the ice
breaks; and presently the time for the reindeer hunt comes round.
Every minute of the summer season is consumed in laying in a stock of
all these aliments for a long and dreary season, when nothing can be
caught. The women collect herbs and roots. As the summer is just about
to end, the herrings appear in shoals, and a new source of subsistence
is opened up, Later still, they fish by opening holes in the
newly-formed ice. Nor is Kolimsk without its trade. The chief traffic
of the region is at the fair of Ostrovnoye, but Nijnei-Kolimsk has
its share. The merchants who come to collect the furs which the
adventurous Tchouktchas have acquired, even on the opposite side of
Behring's Straits, from the North American Indians, halt here, and
sell tea, tobacco, brandy, and other articles.

The long night had set in when Ivan and his companions entered
Kolimsk. Well it was they had come, for the cold was becoming
frightful in its intensity, and the people of the village were
much surprised at the arrival of travelers. But they found ready
accommodation, a Cossack widower giving them half his house.

* * * * *

[FROM DICKENS'S HOUSEHOLD WORDS.]

THE BELGIAN LACE-MAKERS.

The indefatigable, patient, invincible, inquisitive, sometimes
tedious, but almost always amusing German traveler, Herr Kohl, has
recently been pursuing his earnest investigations in Belgium. His book
on the Netherlands has just been issued, and we shall translate, with
abridgments, one of its most instructive and agreeable chapters;--that
relating to Lace-making.

The practical acquaintance of our female readers with that elegant
ornament, lace, is chiefly confined to wearing it, and their
researches into its quality and price. A few minutes' attention to
Mr. Kohl will enlighten them on othe