In the homes of these least advanced Buriats we loiter no longer than we must. The wooden house which shelters them is hermetically sealed, and is crowded with people and animals. Fenced off in a corner of the first that receives us is a corral of thirteen lambs, which at uncertain moments begin to bleat suddenly in unison, producing, with startling effect, a prodigious volume of sound. When one has been roused from sleep half a dozen times a night by this chorus, he is strongly inspired to move on. The men are out during the day looking to their flocks. The women spend a good part of their time sewing furs or making felt. They are very unclean, and it is a decided relief to get out of their homes, to which the cold compels one to have recourse on a long journey. In spring, with great and understandable relief, these semi-nomads take to their felt tents and move where fancy and pasturage dictate. One grade higher are those Buriats who have learned some rudimentary farming from the Orthodox. You will see the men threshing on a level floor beside the corral. They are dressed in long blue or magenta fur-lined cloaks and colored cone-shaped hats. Other Buriats are permanently resident in the Slavonic settlements, and send their rosy-faced children to school. They mix with the Russians, subject to almost no disabilities, and their better classes contract inter-racial marriages, which seem, to an outsider, at least, completely happy and successful. It is no small thing, this which Russian rule has done for the Buriats. A people whom any other nation would spurn in racial ostracism, perhaps would eliminate, live side by side with the good-natured Slav in perfect accord, progressing in civilization and material well-being as high as the individual can aspire to and attain. They are ruled by their own chiefs, whose sway is tempered by the benevolent supervision of the general government. They are represented in the Duma by men of their own selection. They freely worship the Buddhist Burhan in their lamasery near Cellinginsk, without pope to preach or missionary to proselyte. Their easy citizenship is unharassed by money taxes, and their only obligation is Cossack service in the army. But Cossack service to a Buriat is what a picnic is to a boy. Riding around on horseback, rationed by the Government, visiting a city with real tobacco and vodka sometimes attainable, sleeping on a straw-stuffed mattress with no tethered lambs to murder sleep, when they are used to a sheepskin on the dirt floor,--all this is luxury of blissful memory, during the years of the reserve. The net result is that the Buriats are entirely content. They are progressing all along the line, and are being made useful to the nation, not by unpayable taxation, but by the service which they are so especially fitted to render.