of the rapid accumulation of frost in their nostrils, it relieved my apprehensions of their breaking down, but did not alter my firm conviction that my ideal reindeer was infinitely superior in an aesthetic point of view to the real animal.  I could not but admit, however, the inestimable value of the reindeer to his wandering owners.  Besides carrying them from place to place, he furnishes them with clothes, food, and covering for their tents; his antlers are made into rude implements of all sorts; his sinews are dried and pounded into thread, his bones are soaked in seal oil and burned for fuel, his entrails are cleaned, filled with tallow, and eaten; his blood, mixed with the contents of his stomach, is made into manyalla; his marrow and tongue are considered the greatest of delicacies; the stiff, bristly skin of his legs is used to cover snow-shoes; and finally his whole body, sacrificed to the Korak gods, brings down upon his owners all the spiritual and temporal blessings which they need.  It would be hard to find another animal which fills so important a place in the life of any body of men, as the reindeer does in the life and domestic economy of the Siberian Koraks.  I cannot now think of one which furnishes even the four prime requisites of food, clothing, shelter, and transportation.  It is a singular fact, however, that the Siberian natives—­the only people, so far as I know, who have ever domesticated the reindeer, except the Laps—­do not use in any way the animal’s milk.  Why so important and desirable an article of food should be neglected, when every other part of the deer’s body is turned to some useful account, I cannot imagine.  It is certain, however, that no one of the four great wandering tribes of north-eastern Siberia, Koraks, Chukchis, Tunguses, and Lamutkis, uses in any way the reindeer’s milk.

By two o’clock in the afternoon it began to grow dark, but we estimated that we had accomplished at least half of our day’s journey, and halted for a few moments to allow our deer to eat.  The last half of the distance seemed interminable.  The moon rose round and bright as the shield of Achilles, and lighted up the vast, lonely tundra with noonday brilliancy; but the silence and desolation, the absence of any dark object upon which the fatigued eye could rest, and the apparently boundless extent of this Dead Sea of snow, oppressed us with new and strange sensations of awe.  A dense mist or steam, which is an unfailing indication of intense cold, rose from the bodies of the reindeer and hung over the road long after we had passed.  Beards became tangled masses of frozen iron wire; eyelids grew heavy with white rims of frost and froze together when we winked; noses assumed a white, waxen appearance with every incautious exposure, and only by frequently running beside our sledges could we keep any “feeling” in our feet.  Impelled by hunger and cold, we repeated twenty times the despairing question, “How much farther is it?” and twenty times we received