The Goldees and Mangoons practice Shamanism in its general features, and have a few customs peculiar to themselves.  At a Goldee village I saw a man wearing a wooden representation of an arm, and learned that it is the practice to wear amulets to cure disease, the amulet being shaped like the part affected.  A lame person carries a small leg of wood, an individual suffering from dyspepsia a little stomach, and so on through a variety of disorders.  A hypochondriac who thought himself afflicted all over had covered himself with these wooden devices, and looked like a museum of anatomy on its travels.  I thought the custom not unknown in America, as I had seen ladies in New York wearing hearts of coral and other substances on their watch-chains.  Evidently the fashion comes from l’Amour.

[Illustration:  THE HYPOCHONDRIAC.]

The morning after leaving Doloe we had a rain-storm with high wind that blew us on a lee shore.  The river was four or five miles wide where the gale caught us, and the banks on both sides were low.  The islands in this part of the river were numerous and extensive.  At one place there are three channels, each a mile and a half wide and all navigable.  From one bank to the other straight across the islands is a distance of nineteen miles.

The wind and weather prevented our making much progress on that day; as the night was cloudy we tied up near a Russian village and economised the darkness by taking wood.  At a peasant’s house near the landing four white-headed children were taking their suppers of bread and soup under the supervision of their mother.  Light was furnished from an apparatus like a fishing jack attached to the wall; every few minutes the woman fed it with a splinter of pine wood.  Very few of the peasants on the Amoor can afford the expense of candles, and as they rarely have fire-places they must burn pine splinters in this way.

Along the Amoor nearly every peasant house contains hundreds, and I think thousands, of cockroaches.  They are quiet in the day but do not fail to make themselves known at night.  The table where these children were eating swarmed with them, and I can safely say there wore five dozen on a space three feet square.  They ran everywhere about the premises except into the fire.  Walls, beds, tables, and floors were plentifully covered with these disagreeable insects.  The Russians do not appear to mind them, and probably any one residing in that region would soon be accustomed to their presence.  Occasionally they are found in bread and soup, and do not improve the flavor.

Life on the steamboat was a trifle monotonous, but I found something new daily.  Our steward (who is called Boofetchee in Russian) brought me water for washing when I rose in the morning, and the samovar with tea when I was dressed.  Borasdine rose about the time I did and joined me at tea.  Then we had breakfast of beef and bread with potatoes about eleven or twelve o’clock, and dinner at six.