Far more petting than the Russian babies get is lavished on the little Mongols. Perhaps the much smaller families (only two or three children to a hut) allow more attention per capita. The mother hands Turunga over to her father,--unheard-of in Siberia,--and he plays with the child, giving her pieces of sheep’s tail to eat from his mouth, answering her prattle or baby-talk and endless questions. At night, about eight o’clock, the mother takes the child to the couch and they both go to sleep, Turunga cuddled warmly under her mother’s _shuba_. Meanwhile we men sit cross-legged by the fire and talk of many things,--of the pasturage for the sheep, of the snow on the road, of the beauty of the housewife’s silver headplates, of water and roads, of whether or not the Mongol _dokchits_ on the altar are like the Gobi wolves that hate Chinese. It is interesting to note how some of the words used (few, however) have a familiar sound--although there is said to be no common ancestry with the Indo-Germanic tongues; perhaps it is only the instinctive sound-imitation which makes the Mongol baby cry “Mama” to its mother, as does the child in Chita and in Chicago. “Mine,” for instance, is _mina_; “thine” is _tenei_. A horse or mare is _mari_. The word for “it is,” “they are,” is _beine_, a fairly respectable form of the verb “to be” in Chaucer’s English. The grammar is delightfully simple. In the vernacular there is no bothering about singular or plural. “One hut” is _niger gir_; “two huts,” _hayur gir_. “Milk” is _su_, and apparently the word for “water” was formed from it--_ou su_. If one wants to know whether it is time to throw in the meat-balls he says, “_Ou su boutzela?_” with a rising inflection (“Water boils?”) and the answer is, “_Boutzela_.” The “moon” and a “month” are _sara_, and the years go in cycles of twelve. If one wants to compliment the host on the excellence of the sandal-shaped bread which he hands out, loaded with gray chalky cheese (_hourut_), one says, “Bread good be” (_Boba sein beine_); this gives him great pleasure. Some of the written numbers are somewhat like ours: 2 and 3 are nearly the same, but they have fallen forward on their faces; 6 has an extra tail. When the teapot overturns, they say “_Harlab!_” to relieve their feelings. There is no word for “so good,” “farewell,” or “much obliged.” These are just squeezed into the heartiness of the final “good” (_sein_). So when one leaves, he holds out both arms, palms up, for the host to put his own upon, and says loudly, “_Sein oh!_” A not unbarren amusement is to study out one’s own derivations for some much-explained words. _Tamerlane_ is often given as meaning “the lame.” Why does it not rather come from _temur_ (iron) and mean “man of iron,” as the ruler of the Khalka tribe was called Altan Khan, the golden king? The Amur River has _khara-muren_ (black water) usually given as its derivative root. Why not the Mongol word _amur_, which means simply “quiet”?