a mist of reindeer hairs, scraped off from the coming man’s fur coat, you see a thin pair of legs descending the pole in a cloud of smoke.  The legs of your acquaintances you soon learn to recognise by some peculiarity of shape or covering; and their faces, considered as means of personal identification, assume a secondary importance.  If you see Ivan’s legs coming down the chimney, you feel a moral certainty that Ivan’s head is somewhere above in the smoke; and Nicolai’s boots, appearing in bold relief against the sky through the entrance hole, afford as satisfactory proof of Nicolai’s identity as his head would, provided that part of his body came in first.  Legs, therefore, are the most expressive features of a Korak’s countenance, when considered from an interior standpoint.  When snow drifts up against the yurt, so as to give the dogs access to the chimney, they take a perfect delight in lying around the hole, peering down into the yurt, and snuffing the odours of boiling fish which rise from the huge kettle underneath.  Not unfrequently they get into a grand comprehensive free fight for the best place of observation; and just as you are about to take your dinner of boiled salmon off the fire, down comes a struggling, yelping dog into the kettle, while his triumphant antagonist looks down through the chimney hole with all the complacency of gratified vengeance upon his unfortunate victim.  A Korak takes the half-scalded dog by the back of the neck, carries him up the chimney, pitches him over the edge of the yurt into a snow-drift, and returns with unruffled serenity to eat the fish-soup which has thus been irregularly flavoured with dog and thickened with hairs.  Hairs, and especially reindeer’s hairs, are among the indispensable ingredients of everything cooked in a Korak yurt, and we soon came to regard them with perfect indifference.  No matter what precautions we might take, they were sure to find their way into our tea and soup, and stick persistently to our fried meat.  Some one was constantly going out or coming in over the fire, and the reindeerskin coats scraping back and forth through the chimney hole shed a perfect cloud of short grey hairs, which sifted down over and into everything of an eatable nature underneath.  Our first meal in a Korak yurt, therefore, at Kamenoi, was not at all satisfactory.

[Illustration:  HOUR-GLASS HOUSES OF THE SETTLED KORAKS From a model in The American Museum of Natural History]

We had not been twenty minutes in the settlement before the yurt that we occupied was completely crowded with stolid, brutal-looking men, dressed in spotted deerskin clothes, wearing strings of coloured beads in their ears, and carrying heavy knives two feet in length in sheaths tied around their legs.  They were evidently a different class of natives from any we had yet seen, and their savage animal faces did not inspire us with much confidence.  A good-looking