The inhabitants of the town are chiefly traders, who buy of the Yakouta hunters their furs at a cheap rate, and then sell them in a mysterious kind of fashion to the agents who come from Russia in search of them.  During the annual fair they stow up their goods in private rooms; and here the Irkoutsk men must come and find them.  These traders are the Russian inhabitants, the native Yakoutas being the only artisans.  In this distant colony of the human race, the new-born child of a Russian is given to a Yakouta woman to nurse, and when old enough, learns to read and write, after which he is brought up to the fur trade, and his education is finished.

Ivan Ivanovitch was a young man born and bred at Yakoutsk.  His parents had given him the usual amount of tuition, and then allowed him for a time to follow the bent of his inclination.  Ivan took to the chase.  Passionately fond of this amusement, he had at an early age started with the Yakouta trappers, and become learned in the search for sables, ermines, and lynxes; could pursue the reindeer and elk on skates; and had even gone to the north in quest of seals.  He thus at the age of twenty, knew the whole active part of his trade, and was aware of all the good hunting-grounds on which the Siberians founded their prosperity.  But when he was called on to follow the more quiet and sedentary part of his occupation, he was not one-half so quick.  His rough and rude life made town existence distasteful to him, and he evinced all that superb contempt for shop-keeping which characterizes the nomadic man, whether Red Indian, Arab, Tartar, or Siberian.

But Ivan was told he must make his way in the world.  His parents who died before he attained to manhood, left him a small fortune in rubles and furs, which, if he chose to be industrious and persevering, might pave the way to the highest position in his native town.  Acting on the pressing advice of his friends, he gave up his wanderings, and went to reside in the house of his fathers, piled up his skins and ivory, bought new ones, and prepared for the annual fair.  The merchants from Irkoutsk, the capital, came, and Ivan, who was sharp and clever, did a good trade.  But when his furs and teeth were changed into tea, tobacco, brandy, cloth, &c., he did not feel a whit happier.  Ivan longed for the arid hills, and lofty mountains, and pellucid lakes—­for the exciting hunt and the night bivouac, when gray-headed Yakoutas would, with their ganzis—­the Irish duddeen—­in their mouths, tell terrible and wonderful stories of ancient days.  When eating town fare, his stomach yearned after frozen Yakouta butter, cut up with axes, and for strouganina or frozen fish, with reindeer brains, and other northern delicacies.  And then his kind friends told him that he wanted a wife—­a possession without which, they assured him, life was dull, adding that in her society he would cease to long for communion with bears and savages.