[Illustration:  A WOMAN ENTERING A YURT OF THE SETTLED KORAKS]

Mikina was only a copy of Kamenoi on a smaller scale.  It had the same hour-glass houses, the same conical balagans elevated on stilts, and the same large skeletons of sealskin baideras (bai’-der-ahs’) or ocean canoes were ranged in a row on the beach.  We climbed up the best-looking yurt in the village—­over which hung a dead disembowelled dog, with a wreath of green grass around his neck—­and slid down the chimney into a miserable room filled to suffocation with blue smoke, lighted only by a small fire on the earthen floor, and redolent of decayed fish and rancid oil.  Viushin soon had a teakettle over the fire, and in twenty minutes we were seated like cross-legged Turks on the raised platform at one end of the yurt, munching hardbread and drinking tea, while about twenty ugly, savage-looking men squatted in a circle around us and watched our motions.  The settled Koraks of Penzhinsk Gulf are unquestionably the worst, ugliest, most brutal and degraded natives in all north-eastern Siberia.  They do not number more than three or four hundred, and live in five different settlements along the seacoast; but they made us more trouble than all the other inhabitants of Siberia and Kamchatka together.  They led, originally, a wandering life like the other Koraks; but, losing their deer by some misfortune or disease, they built themselves houses of driftwood on the seacoast, settled down, and now gain a scanty subsistence by fishing, catching seals, and hunting for carcasses of whales which have been killed by American whaling vessels, stripped of blubber, and then cast ashore by the sea.  They are cruel and brutal in disposition, insolent to everybody, revengeful, dishonest, and untruthful.  Everything which the Wandering Koraks are they are not.  The reasons for the great difference between the settled and the Wandering Koraks are various.  In the first place, the former live in fixed villages, which are visited very frequently by the Russian traders; and through these traders and Russian peasants they have received many of the worst vices of civilisation without any of its virtues.  To this must be added the demoralising influence of American whalers, who have given the settled Koraks rum and cursed them with horrible diseases, which are only aggravated by their diet and mode of life.  They have learned from the Russians to lie, cheat, and steal; and from whalers to drink rum and be licentious.  Besides all these vices, they eat the intoxicating Siberian toadstool in inordinate quantities, and this habit alone will in time debase and brutalise any body of men to the last degree.  From nearly all these demoralising influences the Wandering Koraks are removed by the very nature of their life.  They spend more of their time in the open air, they have healthier and better-balanced physical constitutions, they rarely see Russian traders or drink Russian vodka, and they