in reception
costume, which he did by putting on his shirt.

After wishing this aboriginal a long and happy life, and thanking him
for his courtesy, we departed. I bumped my head against the rafters
both in entering and leaving, and found considerable difference
between the temperature in the house and out of it. The peasant
offered to guide us to visit more Goldees, but we returned to the boat
and retired to sleep.

The Russian peasants and the natives live in perfect harmony and are
of mutual advantage and assistance. The peasant furnishes the native
with salt, flour, and other things, while the latter catches fish,
enough for both. Each has a peaceable disposition, and I was told that
quarrels were of rare occurrence.

The Chinese call the natives _Yu-pi-ta-tze_, which in English means
'wearers of fish-skins.' I saw many garments of fish-skins, most of
them for summer use. The operation of preparing them is quite simple.
The skins are dried and afterward pounded, the blows making them
flexible and removing the scales. This done they are ready to be sewn
into garments.

[Illustration: A GOLDEE HOUSE]

A coat of this material embroidered and otherwise decorated is far
from ugly, and sheds water like India rubber. Fish skins are used in
making sails for boats and for the windows of houses. A Russian who
had worn a Goldee coat said it was both warm and waterproof, and he
suggested that it would be well to adopt fish-skin garments in
America.

The Goldees and Mangoons practice Shamanism in its general features,
and have a few customs peculiar to themselves. At a Goldee village I
saw a man wearing a wooden representation of an arm, and learned that
it is the practice to wear amulets to cure disease, the amulet being
shaped like the part affected. A lame person carries a small leg of
wood, an individual suffering from dyspepsia a little stomach, and so
on through a variety of disorders. A hypochondriac who thought himself
afflicted all over had covered himself with these wooden devices, and
looked like a museum of anatomy on its travels. I thought the custom
not unknown in America, as I had seen ladies in New York wearing
hearts of coral and other substances on their watch-chains. Evidently
the fashion comes from l'Amour.

[Illustration: THE HYPOCHONDRIAC.]

The morning after leaving Doloe we had a rain-storm with high wind
that blew us on a lee shore. The river was four or five miles wide
where the gale caught