In another part of the building there stuffs to repletion an army of dependents. Servants, artisans, drivers from the caravans which pass up from China by the road below the house, a whole other below-stairs world is here. Twenty caravan teamsters, _karetniki_ or _isvoschniki_ of the sledges and carts that fill the ample courtyard, huddle in the back rooms for tea. An old bespectacled maker of string-net doilies, who reads Alexander Pushkin’s poems, is working out a week’s board in the room where the chickens are kept. The housewife does not disdain, either, to find a place for the traveling _sapojnik_, who will put leather reinforcements on the felt boots which have been worn through at the heel. It is a large easy way of living, this of the man who holds a leading place in the border city. [Illustration: A CHICKOYA GIRL] [Illustration: TROITZKOSAVSK STUDENT] A mixture of crudeness and culture, of luxury and hardship, of Orient and Occident, runs through the quaint fabric of frontier society, with its medley of races and types. Fine avenues flanked by stuccoed houses pierce the main city. Back of them lie the log houses of the plainer citizens, while the outskirts are occupied by the felt huts of the Buriats and Mongols. Students in uniform elbow Cossacks of the Guard, and maidens from the seminary brush the Mongol wood-choppers. “Téatre?” suggests one evening the twenty-year-old son of your host. Of course the invitation is accepted. At eight o’clock you put on your felt boots, and tramp down past dark-shuttered log houses and the silent white church into the field, where stands a barn-like building placarded with the programme. The young guide secures seats at the ticket-counter of rough lumber. Seventy-five kopecks they are, each. With them are handed out eight numbered slips of red paper. Then together you break a way to the front rows, through the crowd of burly Cossacks of the garrison, bearskin-capped students, citizens with shiny black boots, and here and there a husky stolid-faced Buriat. Keeping hat and coat on, as does every one else, we find seats on the rough benches wheresoever we like or can; for nothing is reserved save the elevated perch of the musicians, where a four-piece orchestra drones out a monotonous Russian march. What a fire-trap! is the first thought. To each of the posts that sustain the rafters is fastened a lamp shedding an uncertain light on the hangings of bright-red cotton cloth, in dangerous proximity to which, utterly disregarding the “no smoking” signs, stand the crowd of forty-kopeck admissions, rolling and smoking perpetual _papirosi_.