king teeth and arms,
suggestive of a long embrace, stood unpleasantly near, though their
owners had thought fit to secure them.

This people's religion is a strange mixture of heathenism and Greek
church Christianity. The czar's soldiers have a very short and effective
manner of converting the subjugated races which bow before their swords,
by driving the whole batch at the point of the bayonet into the nearest
stream, whilst a little Greek cross is put round the neck of each, and a
copy of the bible given them. Near these huts I observed an idol of the
rudest construction. It was supposed, I presume, to represent a man's
shape--but it was merely a flat board, with the lower end sharpened to a
point to fix in the ground, and the upper end fashioned into a very
ambiguous circle to form a head; the mouth, nose, and eyes being
afterwards added in pigment. One old gent pulled from some obscure
retreat in the internal structure of his ample ulster, a pocket edition
of the Acts of the Apostles, in English, and from the careful manner in
which it was preserved, and the security of its hiding place, he seemed
to set great store by it. I tried to surmise how such a volume could
have come into his possession, and could only account for it by
supposing it had washed up on the beach; but then, if so, why such
reverential care of the book. Missionaries, say you. Well, a missionary
would scarcely provide himself with copies of the English scripture for
distribution amongst gilyaks and calmuck Tartars.

Meanwhile our fishers had pushed on still further inland, dragging the
dingy after them, and had met with such success that they returned to
camp with their boat laden to the gunwale with salmon and salmon trout.
But of all the fish taken that day, by far the finest specimen was that
captured near the camping ground. This was a magnificent salmon, of over
forty pounds weight, that had become entangled in the long grass with
which the surface of the river was covered, a circumstance which
rendered him an easy prey to his enemies.

Resuming our southward voyage, our next place of call was Barracouta
harbour. It was here, if I am rightly informed, that a French naval
officer shot himself, because he had allowed the Russian squadron to
overreach him. It was during the Crimean war, the English and French
squadrons had hunted the station all over to come up with the Russians,
but though they often sighted the enemy, they never succeeded in