When their help is required, offerings are made to them, but if the desired help be not given, the _hake_ gets scolded, refused his food, and sometimes is kicked out into the snow. The face of the _hake_, or what serves as face, is smeared with reindeer blood. It is the same with the Ostjaks. Their idols are dressed in scarlet, furnished with weapons, and their faces smeared with ochre. They are called _Jitjan_. “Often,” says Castrén, “each of these figures has its special office. One is supposed to protect the reindeers, another to help in the fishery, another to care for the health of the family, etc. When need arrives, the figures are drawn forth and set up in a tent at the reindeer pastures, the hunting or fishing grounds. They are presented with sacrifices now and then, which consist in smearing their lips with train oil or blood, and putting before them a vessel with fish or meat.”[26] It is very much the same thing with the negro, who stands on the same intellectual level as the Siberian savage. His fetish is anything out of the way--a strangely-shaped stone or bit of bone, a bunch of feathers, a doll, anything about which his imagination may work, and his reason remain torpid. I have watched a little boy of six play with a piece of ash twig. I drew it, and noted what his proceedings were. He had picked up this twig, and suddenly exclaimed, “I have found a horse. It is lying down. Get up, horse! Get up!” He took it to some grass to make it eat, then went with it to a pond, and made it drink. There the twig fell in, and he cried out that the horse was swimming. I picked out the twig for him. Presently, by throwing it into the air, he found that his horse could fly. Finally, he set to work to build a stable, and furnish it for his horse. [Illustration: _Fig. 36._--THE HORSE.] I had been reading Castrén’s account of the _hakes_ and _jitjan_ at the time, and under my eyes was a child doing with a bit of stick exactly what a Turanian nomad of full age does now, and has done for thousands of years. In two or three years this boy’s mind will have expanded, and his reason have got in the saddle, and will hold in the imaginative faculty with bit and bridle, and then he will cease to see horses in ash twigs; but the wanderers on the Asiatic tundras have never got beyond the stage of an English child of six and never will. I quote a passage from “The Beggynhof; or, City of the Single,” to show how that it is possible for a tolerably-educated, religious Belgian of the present day to stand at the same point as that of a child of six, and of an Ostjak savage.