or polar fox; there are swans, and geese, and ducks, partridges and snipes, and in the rivers abundance of fish.  And yet, though the population be now so scanty, and the date of the peopling of Kolimsk is known, there was once a numerous race in these regions, the ruins of whose forts and villages are yet found.  The population is about 5000, including the whole district, of whom about 300 are Russians, the descendants of Siberian exiles.  They dwell in houses made of wood thrown up on the shore, and collected by years of patience, and of moss and clay.  The panes of the windows in winter are of ice, six inches thick; in summer, of skins.  The better class are neatly and even tastefully dressed, and are clean, which is the very highest praise that can be given to half-civilized as well as to civilized people.

They are a bold, energetic, and industrious race.  Every hour of weather fit for out-door work is spent in fishing and hunting, and preparing food for the winter.  In the light sledge, or on skates, with nets and spears, they labored at each of these employments in its season.  Toward the end of the long winter, just as famine and starvation threaten the whole population, a perfect cloud of swans, and geese, and ducks, and snipes, pour in; and man and woman, boy and girl, all rush forth to the hunt.  The fish come in next, as the ice breaks; and presently the time for the reindeer hunt comes round.  Every minute of the summer season is consumed in laying in a stock of all these aliments for a long and dreary season, when nothing can be caught.  The women collect herbs and roots.  As the summer is just about to end, the herrings appear in shoals, and a new source of subsistence is opened up, Later still, they fish by opening holes in the newly-formed ice.  Nor is Kolimsk without its trade.  The chief traffic of the region is at the fair of Ostrovnoye, but Nijnei-Kolimsk has its share.  The merchants who come to collect the furs which the adventurous Tchouktchas have acquired, even on the opposite side of Behring’s Straits, from the North American Indians, halt here, and sell tea, tobacco, brandy, and other articles.

The long night had set in when Ivan and his companions entered Kolimsk.  Well it was they had come, for the cold was becoming frightful in its intensity, and the people of the village were much surprised at the arrival of travelers.  But they found ready accommodation, a Cossack widower giving them half his house.

* * * * *

[FROM DICKENS’S HOUSEHOLD WORDS.]

THE BELGIAN LACE-MAKERS.

The indefatigable, patient, invincible, inquisitive, sometimes tedious, but almost always amusing German traveler, Herr Kohl, has recently been pursuing his earnest investigations in Belgium.  His book on the Netherlands has just been issued, and we shall translate, with abridgments, one of its most instructive and agreeable chapters;—­that relating to Lace-making.