Just at this point, a Lama chanced to enter our apartment. When he saw, stretched at our feet, the still warm and bleeding form of the hare, “Tsong-Kaba! Tsong-Kaba!” exclaimed he, starting back, with a gesture of horror, and veiling his eyes with both hands. Then, after launching a malediction against the poor hunter, he asked us whether we should dare to eat that black flesh? “Why not,” rejoined we, “since it can injure neither our bodies nor our souls?” And thereupon, we laid down certain principles of morality, to the purport that the eating of venison is, in itself, no obstacle to the acquisition of sanctity. The hunter was highly delighted with our dissertation: the Lama was altogether confounded. He contented himself with saying, by way of reply, that in us, who were foreigners and of the religion of Jehovah, it might be no harm to eat hares; but that the Lamas must abstain from it, because, if they failed to observe the prohibition and their dereliction became known to the Grand Lama, they would be pitilessly expelled from the Lamasery. Our thesis having been thus victoriously sustained, we next proceeded to entertain the proposition of the hunter, to provide us every day with as many hares as we pleased. First, we asked him whether he was in earnest. Upon his replying in the affirmative, we told him that every morning he might bring us a hare, but on the understanding that we were to pay him for it. “We don’t sell hares here,” replied he; “but since you will not accept them gratuitously, you shall give me for each the value of a gun-charge.” We insisted upon a more liberal scale of remuneration, and, at last, it was arranged that for every piece of game he brought us, we should give him forty sapeks, equivalent to about four French sous. We decided upon eating hares for two reasons. First, as a matter of conscience, in order to prevent the Lamas from imagining that we permitted ourselves to be influenced by the prejudices of the sectaries of Buddha; and, secondly, upon a principle of economy; for a hare cost us infinitely less than our insipid barley-meal. One day, our indefatigable hunter brought us, instead of a hare, an immense roebuck, which is also black flesh and prohibited. In order not to compound in the least degree with Buddhist superstitions, we purchased the roebuck, for the sum of three hundred sapeks (thirty French sous.) Our chimney smoked with venison preparations for eight consecutive days, and all that time Samdadchiemba was in a most amiable frame of mind.