ensable
vade-mecum of all Tartars, and presents it to his hostess, who fills it
with tea and milk, and returns it. In the richer, more easily
circumstanced families, visitors have a small table placed before them,
on which is butter, oatmeal, grated millet, and bits of cheese,
separately contained in little boxes of polished wood. These Tartar
delicacies the visitors take mixed with their tea. Such as propose to
treat their guests in a style of perfect magnificence make them partakers
of a bottle of Mongol wine, warmed in the ashes. This wine is nothing
more than skimmed milk, subjected for awhile to vinous fermentation, and
distilled through a rude apparatus that does the office of an alembic.
One must be a thorough Tartar to relish or even endure this beverage, the
flavour and odour of which are alike insipid.

The Mongol tent, for about three feet from the ground, is cylindrical in
form. It then becomes conical, like a pointed hat. The woodwork of the
tent is composed below of a trellis-work of crossed bars, which fold up
and expand at pleasure. Above these, a circle of poles, fixed in the
trellis-work, meets at the top, like the sticks of an umbrella. Over the
woodwork is stretched, once or twice, a thick covering of coarse linen,
and thus the tent is composed. The door, which is always a folding door,
is low and narrow. A beam crosses it at the bottom by way of threshold,
so that on entering you have at once to raise your feet and lower your
head. Besides the door there is another opening at the top of the tent
to let out the smoke. This opening can at any time be closed with a
piece of felt fastened above it in the tent, and which can be pulled over
it by means of a string, the end of which hangs by the door.

[Picture: Interior of a Tartar Tent]

The interior is divided into two compartments; that on the left, as you
enter, is reserved for the men, and thither the visitors proceed. Any
man who should enter on the right side would be considered excessively
rude. The right compartment is occupied by the women, and there you find
the culinary utensils: large earthen vessels of glazed earth, wherein to
keep the store of water; trunks of trees, of different sizes, hollowed
into the shape of pails, and destined to contain the preparations of
milk, in the various forms which they make it undergo. In the centre of
the tent is a large trivet, planted in the earth, and always ready to
re