milk), and tea, are his customary liquors; but the tea, instead of being prepared in the European fashion, is made into a kind of soup with milk, flour, butter, and salt. In every respectable Kirghiz kibitka the women keep constantly upon the fire a vessel of this beverage, which they offer to visitors, just as a Turk serves up coffee, and a Spaniard chocolate. In their mode of life the Kirghiz display a certain originality. They spend the three winter months in mud huts on the bank of a river or a small stream, and resume their annual migrations as soon as the snow begins to melt. During these migrations they live in tents, and never halt in one spot for longer than three days. Their march is often continued until they have travelled three or four hundred miles; then they turn round, and retrace the same route, so as to reach their place of hibernation before the snow falls. In their selection of quarters they seem guided by some traditions handed down in the different auls; and not unfrequently a body of Kirghiz will pass over much excellent grazing ground, and travel many a league to inferior pasturage. The hardships they undergo are so many, their pleasures so few and mean, their objects so commonplace, that one is tempted to wonder what kind of answer an intelligent Kirghiz would return to the question not long ago put with some emphasis before the reading public, “Is life worth living?” Those higher motives, those purer aspirations which the cultivated European mind delights to recognize, are unknown to the wild nomad, and he spends day after day, and month after month, in what would seem to be a drearily monotonous struggle for existence, under conditions which might be supposed to render existence an intolerable burden. But then he can love and suffer as we know civilized men and women love and suffer; and love and suffering will invest the harshest, coarsest life with a certain grace and consecration.