One becomes after a time somewhat of an adept regarding quarters. To-night the village gives a chance. The most promising exterior is selected, and driving up, we prepare to enter. Cold and cumbersomely muffled, you worm under the felt hut-flap, and see through the pungent smoke of the brazier a dim figure seated to the left of a veiled altar. Bowed over a red-beaded rosary, he is chanting in a low voice, a weird oft-repeated phrase. He ceases as you struggle in, becomes silent, and looks up. “_Amur sein!_” he salutes in quiet greeting, and motions you to a place on the low sheepskin-covered couch, to the right of the altar, opposite him. The open smile of his welcome shows white teeth hardened by the tough biscuit of his daily diet. You note next, with the pleasure born of seeing anything good of its kind, the light color and unwrinkled features of this young man of twenty-five. The gaze of his brown eyes is direct and frank. He is clean-shaven, his hair is close-cropped, and he has the appearance of a well-groomed horse. In contrast with the smoke-blackened, hardship-wrinkled faces of the older Mongols, his is as a drink from a clear mountain spring after stale drafts from a long-carried canteen. His color is that of an athlete trained under the suns of the running-track. His features are defined, the nose not so flat, the eyes larger than the usual Mongol type. His expression is earnest and sincere as he now stands up in his robe of rich orange, trimmed and girdled with red. He welcomes the guests without question,--it is the rule of Mongol hospitality, but you feel for the first time what an intrusion it is for your great Russian tarantass-driver to shoulder his ponderous way into the home of a stranger, loaded with your bearskin rugs and rifles and bags of bread, and to pile them loutishly on the native’s couch. At the other huts wherein you have lodged, this sentiment has not come so strongly. Poor places they were: the hardship-lined faces; the soiled and ragged robes of the women, the threadbareness of the heaped-up sheepskins on the couch, all these revealed that your two-headed eagle of silver was needed, and your coming a windfall. But here are no sheep fenced in, making one feel that standards are superfluous. The fuel is put away in a basket, the bright fire-irons are ranged in a row. The couch of polished wood is orderly, and the skin-rugs on it are folded in their places. The little chests of drawers are brightly polished, and the yellow cap, with its lining of fox-fur, on one of them is new and clean.