e level with its owner.
We had an amusing instance of this soon after we met the first Koraks.
The Major had become impressed in some way with the idea that in order
to get what he wanted from these natives he must impress them with a
proper sense of his power, rank, wealth, and general importance in the
world, and make them feel a certain degree of reverence and respect
for his orders and wishes. He accordingly called one of the oldest and
most influential members of the band to him one day, and proceeded
to tell him, through an interpreter, how rich he was; what immense
resources, in the way of rewards and punishments, he possessed; what
high rank he held; how important a place he filled in Russia, and how
becoming it was that an individual of such exalted attributes should
be treated by poor wandering heathen with filial reverence and
veneration. The old Korak, squatting upon his heels on the ground,
listened quietly to the enumeration of all our leader's admirable
qualities and perfections without moving a muscle of his face; but
finally, when the interpreter had finished, he rose slowly, walked up
to the Major with imperturbable gravity, and with the most benignant
and patronising condescension, patted him softly on the head! The
Major turned red and broke into a laugh; but he never tried again to
overawe a Korak.

Notwithstanding this democratic independence of the Koraks, they are
almost invariably hospitable, obliging, and kind-hearted; and we were
assured at the first encampment where we stopped, that we should
have no difficulty in getting the different bands to carry us on
deer-sledges from one encampment to another until we should reach the
head of Penzhinsk Gulf. After a long conversation with the Koraks who
crowded around us as we sat by the fire, we finally became tired and
sleepy, and with favourable impressions, upon the whole, of this new
and strange people, we crawled into our little _polog_ to sleep. A
voice in another part of the _yurt_ was singing a low, melancholy air
in a minor key as I closed my eyes, and the sad, oft-repeated refrain,
so different from ordinary music, invested with peculiar loneliness
and strangeness my first night in a Korak tent.

To be awakened in the morning by a paroxysm of coughing, caused by
the thick, acrid smoke of a low-spirited fire--to crawl out of a skin
bedroom six feet square into the yet denser and smokier atmosphere of
the tent--to eat a breakfast of dried fi