y one man
and Priluschnoj 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 fishing 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 legions. 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, complained 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
_purti_ for 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 skins, where the windows are whole, the sacred pictures covered
with plates 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 Dickson consist of diorite, hard and
difficult to break in pieces, but weathering readily. The rocky
hills are therefore so generally split up that they form enormous
stone mounds. They were covered with a great abundance of lichens,
and the plains between them yielded to Dr. Kjellman the following
phanerogamous plants:

Cineraria frigida RICHARDS.
Erigeron uniflorus L.
Saussurea alpina DC.
Taraxacum phymatocarpum J. VAHL.
Gy