of their language, usages, nomadic
movements, and the confidence of a few Ostiak
families, may become in a few years a rich
merchant. The Russian merchants fix their
own price on all articles, and pay in their
own way. The commerce is based firmly on
the good faith of the Ostiaks themselves.
Each family deals only with one merchant,
and takes from him only whatever articles
are wanted in the way of flour, knives, axes,
nails, tobacco, calico, &c. They may supply
themselves on credit to the amount of any
fixed number of skins. No city merchant is
more anxious than an Ostiak for the punctual
payment of his debts. If disappointment
should occur through an unproductive hunting
season, or if by the death of the debtor
payment of any due should be postponed, it
remains always as the first claim, and while
one member of the family survives, able to
hunt and fish, the creditor is certain that his
debt will be discharged. No temptation will
induce an Ostiak to sell, for immediate gain,
skins that are due for articles already
consumed. These honest people toil
indefatigably with the spear, the net, the bow
and. arrow, but the profit of their toil goes to
the idler men, who trade between them and
the European market. They themselves
earn but a poor subsistence. They live in
the woods in huts of birch bark in the
summer, without doors or windows, and the
household furniture of a family consists
simply of a bucket made of birch bark, a
basin of the same material, a few wooden
spoons and reindeer skins, to which it is not
essential that an iron kettle should be added,
as the Ostiaks, who use no salt or bread, are
not particular about the cooking of their
food. Fish, they of course eat raw. Even
ladies and gentlemen in Berezov consider
fish to be made insipid by cooking, and when
they go out on fishing parties, carry a little
knife with which to scrape away the scales of
any fish that takes their fancy, fish being to
their minds most delicious when eaten alive
just after it is drawn out of the water. Raw
fish, therefore, is the custom of the whole
place, but Ostiaks will eat fish putrid, raw
meat in any state, blood, entrails, uncooked
foxes, crows, and magpies; also, to the
disgust of their Russian neighbours, hares. The
exiled ladies, however, showed their partiality
for hare, and very much horrified Koslow's wife
when Madame X. had shot one, by desiring
her to roast for dinner the offensive animal.

A short account of the late husband of
Madame Nizegorodtyow, the rich lady in the
great yellow house, will throw a little further
light on Berezovian manners. He had been a
great merchant and a man of enterprise and
judgment. He desired to introduce a spirit
of improvement into his native town. His
native town detested innovation. The
merchant went yearly to the great fairs at Irbit,
and Nishni Novgorod, and there becoming
acquainted with many of the ways of Europe,
he bought and brought back luxuries to
Berezov. He even attempted to introduce
agriculture upon his untilled native soil,
procured the necessary implements, and brought
up the Soswa with him people conversant
with tillage. To this day there is shown
near Berezov a field from which the forest
has been cleared, in which he used to sow his
crops. During the hotter summers he even
produced a few results worth sending to St.
Petersburg, but his fellow-townsmen would
not tolerate his new-fangled ideas. And so
they went out and destroyed his crops. The
merchant then protected his field with a
strong wooden wall. Up rose an incendiary
and burnt it. It was firmly believed in the
district, that if the experiments succeeded,
and agriculture were to be introduced into
the place, the population would be ruined.
We have read stories of this kind of which
the scene has been laid nearer home than
Siberia. The death of the merchant put an
end to his enterprises, but he left in his
house such traces of his character as a collection
of pictures, an organ, a billiard-room,
even an open chimney-grate which his heirs
after his death very soon blocked up. In
Siberia they warm rooms with a stove.

Another peculiarity which it amused the
exiles to observe in Berezovian manners was
the importance attached to that momentous
part of a woman's education—her ability to
make a pudding. A bride is required, on
arriving at her husband's house, to invite
guests to a dinner that shall prove her
quality, and upon which, in fact, her future
reputation will depend. It must be prepared
by her own hands, and both to herself and
her parent's shame will be the consequence if
she be found deficient. If her dinner prove a
triumph, it will recommend to honourable
notice not only herself but also the family in
which she was so soundly trained. Men
marry for domestic comfort in a place where
they are quite unable as bachelors to get it.
Wives, therefore, are in great demand, and
women have opportunity to make choice of
their own husbands, with no chance at all, if
they be not infirm or deformed, of dying
single. Great as is the nicety of rank among
the Berezovians, in marriage all distinctions
founded on it are set aside as inconvenient.
The daughter of a poor Cossack may be
courted by a high government functionary,
and will not unfrequently refuse him.

During the brief summer, Berezovian ladies
visited and went to parties (at which etiquette
demands that ladies sit in one room and
crack cedar nuts, while gentlemen sit in the
next room drinking wine and spirits) in thin
attire. There was a great display of silks and
satins, and all feminine finery. But when.
September opened with a heavy fall of snow,
and the whole dirty town suddenly looked
clean and became covered with a sheet of
white, the gentlemen and ladies out of doors
underwent, to the amusement of the exiles,