them out with a pin, and sucking the whole until nothing but the pellicle is left.”[101] Another says, the ground freezes seven feet in Kirin, and about three in Shingking; the thermometer in winter is thirty degrees below zero. The snow is raised into the air by the north-east winds, and becomes so fine that it penetrates the clothes, houses, and enters even the lungs. When travelling, the eyebrows become a mass of ice, the beard a large flake, and the eyelashes are frozen together; the wind cuts and pierces the skin like razors or needles. The earth is frozen during eight months, but vegetation in summer is rapid, and the streams are swollen by the thawing drifts of snow. The province of KIRIN, or Girin, comprises the country north-east of Shingking, as far as the Amur and Usuri, which bound it on the north and east, while Corea and Shingking lie on the south-east (better separated by the Chang-peh shan than any political confine) and Mongolia on the west. All signs of the line of palisades have disappeared (save at the Passes) in the entire _trajet_ between the Songari and Shan-hai kwan. The region is mountainous, except in the link of that river after the Nonni joins it till the Usuri comes in, measuring about one-fourth of the whole. This extensive region is thinly inhabited by Manchus settled in garrisons along the bottoms of the rivers, by Goldies, Mangoons, Ghiliaks, and tribes having affinity with them, who subsist principally by hunting and fishing, and acknowledge their fealty by a tribute of peltry, but who have no officers of government placed over them. Du Halde calls them _Kíching Tatse_, _Yupí Tatse_, and other names, which seem, indeed, to have been their ancient designations. The _Yu-pí Tahtsí_, or ‘Fish-skin Tartars,’[102] are said to inhabit the extensive valley of the Usuri, and do not allow the subjects of the Emperor to live among them. In winter they nestle together in kraals like the Bushmen, and subsist upon the products of their summer’s fishing, having cut down fuel enough to last them till warm weather. Shut out, as they have been during the past, from all elevating influences, these people are likely to be ere long amalgamated and lost, as well among Russian and other settlers coming in from the north, as amid the Chinese immigrants who occupy their land in the south. The entire population of this province cannot be reckoned, from present information, as high as three millions, the greater part of which live along the Songari valley. ~TOWNS AND PRODUCTIONS OF KIRIN PROVINCE.~