With a spirit of hospitality the Colonel prepared us a breakfast during our brief stay, and invited us to join him in the beverage of the country.  When we returned to the boat the steward was superintending the killing of a bullock at the bank.  Half a dozen wolfish dogs were standing ready to breakfast as soon as the slaughtering was over.  A Cossack officer in a picturesque costume stood on the bank near the boat.  He wore an embroidered coat of sheepskin, the wool inside, a shaggy cap of coal-black wool, and a pair of fur-topped boots.  All his garments were new and well fitting, and contrasted greatly with the greasy and long used coats of the Cossacks on the boat.  Sheepskin garments can look more repulsive than cloth ones with equal wearing.  Age can wither and custom stale their infinite variety.

Winding among the mountains and cliffs that enclose the valley we reached in the evening a village four miles below the head of the Amoor.  I rose at daybreak on the 17th to make my adieus to the river.  The morning was clear and frosty, and the stars were twinkling in the sky, save in the east where the blush of dawn was visible.  The hills were faintly touched with a little snow that had fallen during the night.  The trunks of the birches rose like ghosts among the pines and larches of the forest, while craggy rocks pushed out here and there like battlements of a fortress.  The pawing steamer with her mane of stars breasted the current with her prow bearing directly toward the west.

“Just around that point,” said the first officer of the Korsackoff as he directed his finger toward a headland on the Chinese shore, “you will see the mouth of the Argoon on the left and the Shilka on the right;—­wait a moment, it is not quite time yet.”

When we rounded the promontory dawn had grown to daylight, and the mountains on the south bank of the Argoon came into view.  A few minutes later I saw the defile of the Shilka.  Between the streams the mountains narrowed and came to a point a mile above the meeting of the waters.  On the delta below the mountains is the Russian village and Cossack post of Oust-Strelka (Arrow Mouth,) situated in Latitude 53 deg. 19’ 45” North, and Longitude 121 deg. 50’ 7” East.  It is on the Argoon side of the delta and contains but a few houses.  I knew by the smoke that so gracefully curled in the cold atmosphere that the inhabitants were endeavoring to make themselves comfortable.

The Amoor is formed by the union of these rivers, just as the Ohio is formed by the Allegheny and Monongahela.  Geographers generally admit that the parent stream of a river is the one whose source is farthest from the junction.  The Argoon flows from the lake Koulon, which is filled by the river Kerolun, rising in the Kentei Khan mountains in Northern Mongolia.  Together the Argoon and Kerolun have a development of more than a thousand miles.  There are many Cossacks settled along the Argoon as a frontier guard.  The river is not navigable, owing to numerous rocks and rapids.