Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/171

Rh "There is a Tavern in the Town." Mr. Frost, meanwhile, had shirked his duty and his kúmis by pretending that he could not drink and draw simultaneously, and that he wanted to make a likeness of the patriarch's six-year-old son. This seemed to be a very adroit scheme on Mr. Frost's part, but it did not work as well as he had expected. No sooner had he begun to make the sketch than the boy's mother, taking alarm at the peculiar, searching way in which the artist looked at his subject, and imagining perhaps that her offspring was being mesmerized, paralyzed, or bewitched, swooped down upon the ragged little urchin, and kissing him passionately, as if she had almost lost him forever, carried him away and hid him. This untoward incident cast such a gloom over the subsequent proceedings that after singing four verses of "Solomon Levi," in a vain attempt to restore public confidence in Mr. Frost, I put away my banjo and we took our departure. I should like to know what traditions are now current in that part of the Kírghis steppe with regard to the two plausible but designing giaours who went about visiting the aüls of the faithful, one of them singing unholy songs to the accompaniment of a strange stringed instrument, while the other cast an "evil eye" upon the children, and tried to get possession of their souls by making likenesses of their bodies.

Day after day we traveled swiftly southward over a good road through the great Kírghis steppe, stopping now and then to pick snowy pond-lilies in some reed-fringed pool, or to visit an aül and drink kúmis with the hospitable nomads in their gray felt tents. Sometimes the road ran down into the shallow valley of the Írtish, through undulating seas of goldenrod and long wild grass, whose wind-swept waves seemed to break here and there in foaming crests of snowy spirea; sometimes it made a long détour into the high, arid steppe back from the river, where the vegetation had been parched to a dull uniform yellow by weeks of hot sunshine; and sometimes it ran suddenly into a low, moist