In the first place, we had milk, curds, butter, and cheese, _a
discretion_. Then we had discovered a perfect mine, in a hunter of the
vicinity. A few days after our arrival, this Nimrod entered our room,
and taking a magnificent hare from a bag he carried at his back, asked us
whether the Goucho {84} of the Western Heaven ate the flesh of wild
animals. "Certainly," said we; "and we consider hares very nice. Don't
you eat them?" "We laymen do, sometimes, but the Lamas, never. They are
expressly forbidden by the Book of Prayers to eat black flesh." "The
sacred law of Jehovah has prescribed no such prohibition to us." "In
that case keep the animal; and, as you like hares, I will bring you as
many of them every day as you please; the hills about Tchogortan are
completely covered with them."

Just at this point, a Lama chanced to enter our apartment. When he saw,
stretched at our feet, the still warm and bleeding form of the hare,
"Tsong-Kaba! Tsong-Kaba!" exclaimed he, starting back, with a gesture of
horror, and veiling his eyes with both hands. Then, after launching a
malediction against the poor hunter, he asked us whether we should dare
to eat that black flesh? "Why not," rejoined we, "since it can injure
neither our bodies nor our souls?" And thereupon, we laid down certain
principles of morality, to the purport that the eating of venison is, in
itself, no obstacle to the acquisition of sanctity. The hunter was
highly delighted with our dissertation: the Lama was altogether
confounded. He contented himself with saying, by way of reply, that in
us, who were foreigners and of the religion of Jehovah, it might be no
harm to eat hares; but that the Lamas must abstain from it, because, if
they failed to observe the prohibition and their dereliction became known
to the Grand Lama, they would be pitilessly expelled from the Lamasery.

Our thesis having been thus victoriously sustained, we next proceeded to
entertain the proposition of the hunter, to provide us every day with as
many hares as we pleased. First, we asked him whether he was in earnest.
Upon his replying in the affirmative, we told him that every morning he
might bring us a hare, but on the understanding that we were to pay him
for it. "We don't sell hares here," replied he; "but since you will not
accept them gratuitously, you shall give me for each the value of a
gun-charge." We insisted upon a more liberal scale of remuneration, and,
at last,