132 THE HORSE AND HIS RIDER. 



camel to traverse it. Distance and climate vanish 

 before his wandering and adventurous spirit : the re- 

 gions where the burning sun destroys all life and 

 vegetation, or those where " the frost burns frore 

 and cold produces the effect of fire," have never stayed 

 his purpose, or arrested his onward march. With sin- 

 gular versatility he adapts himself to all outward cir- 

 cumstances ; as occasion requires, he combines with 

 his warlike profession the labours of the husbandman, 

 the fisher, the herdsman, and the trader, and readily 

 abandons one character to adopt the other whenever 

 it may be needful. It is not only at the point of the 

 lance he has subdued the wild inhabitants of so large 

 a portion of the globe ; but by his wonderful facility 

 of adapting himself to the customs of the wilderness, 

 and establishing a commercial intercourse with its 

 fiercest hordes. It required a mixture of the reck- 

 less and wandering spirit of the sons of Ishmael, 

 with the intense love of gain peculiar to the children 

 of Israel, both of which his character exhibits, to 

 form the wandering merchant, who could trade and 

 defend his merchandise, and who would penetrate, to 

 effect his purpose, a thousand miles away from his 

 station, either towards the hyperborean regions, or 

 through the parched plains of the naked Steppes. 

 A Russian Tsar might speedily collect from 



