As one nears Chinese territory, by the lower waters of the Chickoya River, the villages of Slavic colonists who hold their land on tax-paying peasant tenure, have given place to the Buriat tribesmen and to the _stanitzas_ of the Cossack guard that occupy the pale of land flanking the frontier. Within this border-belt, every village _stanitza_ holds its quota of Cossacks. These soldiers are for the most part descendants of the levies from the Don region, transplanted to the Trans-Baikal by the Government’s despotic hand in the eighteenth century, and since then forming an hereditary military caste. Many of them are bearded Slavs, indistinguishable, save for their accoutrements, from their more peaceful neighbors. Others are of a peculiar cast of countenance, due to the mixture with the Asiatic tribes in ancient times, when the hunted people fled to their ancestors’ asylum, the territories beyond the Volga and on the Don. There is great variation in type among the imported Cossacks. Most are Orthodox, but a very large number are “Old Believers,” or Semieski. In all the houses now hang the yellow cap and the uniform coat, which must be ever ready against the call of duty. Arms are in the corners of the rooms, and everything has a military look, in marked contrast to the peasant homes. Crude, highly-colored prints of Japanese defeats, which circulated broadcast in Russia during the war, share the attention usually devoted exclusively to holy ikons. Portraits of Generals Linevitch and Kuropatkin, and Admiral Alexiev, are tacked to the walls. In one house we saw hanging a prized silver watch, one of those distributed by General Rennenkamp among the soldiers of his command. One of our Cossack hosts is an old man, Orthodox, and of Russian origin, but with some ancient Asiatic blood, for only a stringy beard grows on his kindly, wrinkled face. With reluctant pride he tells of his three sons away on service, leaving but himself and two daughters at home. With frank happiness he shows you his medals. Every soldier at the front received a round brass service-medal; his, however, a silver cross with St. George and the Dragon on it, is given for valor. He will not drink the vodka he offers you,--rheumatism. But in order that you may smoke some alleged tobacco that greatly interests him because he gathered it himself by the roadside, in Manchuria, he starts up his pipe despite the dust-induced coughs that it begets. He is a kindly, loquacious old man. Another Cossack, privileged to the broad yellow top on his cap and the yellow stripe on his trousers, is, for the time, our guide and gun-carrier. His flat strongly-mustached face is open and ingenuous. He tells of his _sotnia_ in Manchuria.