said: "It is God's will that I should live here among the natives; for me it is all the same. At first it was tedious, but now I am accustomed to the taiga and the wild places. They have grown with me and mingled in my nature."
Often did the Siberian frontiersman talk to me in that rather fatalistic strain, a strain which is characteristic of his race. But in addition to this I often noticed other traits in his character which indicated to me that he had, to some extent, modified his Russian nationality. He referred little to his comrades in the Siberian villages: his mind was fixed upon his life out there in the wild country, where he could pursue his independent life unaided and unhampered by the village commune. He was, I think, less of a true Russian and had more of the true Siberian aboriginal element about him. For in his ideas he seemed strangely out of touch with his peasant kinsmen on the north of the frontier, or even with his wool-trading brethren of the frontier steppes. His isolation in the depths of gloomy forests and almost unknown wooded valleys had a peculiar effect upon his nature. I thought I could discern that his national ideals and even his national religion had been to some extent modified. After all, is it not natural that alone and surrounded by wild nature from year to year, unable, except on rare occasions, to return to kinsmen in the frontier villages, his national consciousness and even his national religion should lose much of its reality? Indeed with the Russians their nationality is their religion, and their religion their nationality, and when the one grows weak through natural circumstances, the other will weaken too. Nor can we marvel
