tion. There were the Abakansk Tartars, natives of Central Siberia, who had been in contact with the Siberian peasants all their lives. Half Christian and half native-worshippers, no strong religious feeling separated them from the Russians, and they were as much at home in a Siberian's house as they were in their own rough log-huts, which, as I described above, imitate the Russian house in material and the Tartar yurt in shape. These, as servants of the Russian wool traders, sat down to break bread in the house of their masters, for the social, racial and religious barrier between the two was very slight. They had advanced one stage in the process of Russification beyond the native Altaians who lived in felt yurts on the open steppes outside. The latter, although always having intercourse with the Siberian frontiersman, nevertheless have as yet lost nothing of their nomad Tartar habits.
As for the Kazan Tartars, representatives of the other group who sat at table with us, except for their shaven heads, skull-caps, and little pointed beards, which gave them a slightly Turkish expression, no one would distinguish them from the Siberians. In habits and manner they were completely Russian, nor did their strict adherence to Islam prevent them from breaking bread with us that evening. As I looked from the Kazan Tartars to the Abakansk Tartars and then to the Siberian wool trader, sitting round the table together, I saw before me two races in the process of gradual absorption by the third. The Kazan Tartars, through centuries of contact with the Russians in Europe, have absorbed Slavonic civilization, and, as this gathering showed, the two were now going forth together, as subjects of the
