IV.] 
SCARCITY OF RUSSIAN HOUSEWIVES. 
195 
inhabited by one man and Prilnschnoj by an old man and his 
son. All were poor; they dwelt in small turf-covered cabins, 
consisting of a lobby and a dirty room, smoked and sooty, with 
a large fireplace, wooden benches along the walls, and a sleeping 
place fixed to the wall, high above the floor. Of household 
furniture only the implements of Ashing and the chase were 
numerously represented. There were in addition pots and pans, 
and occasionally a tea-urn. The houses were all situated near 
the river-bank, so high up that they could not be reached by 
the spring inundations. A disorderly midden was always to be 
found in the near neighbourhood, with a number of draught 
dogs wandering about on it seeking something to eat. Only 
one of the Russian settlers here was married, and we were 
informed that there was no great supply of the material for 
Russian housewives for the inhabitants of these regions. At 
least the Cossack Feodor, who in 1875 and 1876 made several 
unsuccessful attempts to serve me as pilot, and who himself 
was a bachelor already grown old and wrinkled, comjalained 
that the fair or weaker sex was poorly represented among the 
Russians. He often talked of the advantages of mixed 
marriages, being of opinion, under the inspiration of memory 
or hope, I know not which, that a Dolgan woman was the 
most eligible parti ioT a man disposed to marry in that part of 
the world. 
A little farther south, but still far north of the limit of trees, 
there are, however, very well-to-do peasants, who inhabit large 
simovies, consisting of a great number of houses and rooms, in 
which a certain luxury prevails, where one walks on floor- 
coverings of shins, where the windows are whole, the sacred 
pictures covered with pHtes of gold and silver, and the walls 
provided with mirrors and covered with finely coloured copper¬ 
plate portraits of Russian Czars and generals. This prosperity 
is won by traffic with the natives, who wander about as nomads 
on the tundra with their reindeer herds. 
The cliffs around Port Hickson consist of diorite, hard and 
0 2 
