among the neighbours, weeping maudlin tears and crying shame on her stepdaughter’s head. If talking is a proof of grief, she was very grieved indeed. The news of the affair soon spread over the village, and poor Mrs. Cameron was much sympathised with and pitied. One circumstance gave her the look of a martyr. The child was not to be blamed, she asseverated weeping; no. Her cruel, heartless daughter had left it behind her; but no matter. She herself would be a mother to it. You must imagine how the women praised this soft-hearted angel, who took so tenderly to the little innocent child.
I have little more to tell, and I will not exhaust my reader’s patience in telling it. The whole truth came out in good time. A year and some months after Jessie’s departure, the cholera passed over the village. Mrs. Cameron was one of its many victims. Before her death, this woman told the whole story to the minister, who lost no time in communicating it to Jock. The baby was her own; it had been born three days after her departure on a pretended visit to her sister. The place of its birth was the cottage of its father, Rab Simpson, a dissolute rascal who lived alone, and who reluctantly consented to receive the frightened mother. She asserted most positively that the crime had not been premeditated; it was suddenly suggested by her dread of shame and ignominy. On her departure from home, she had found the key among the loose things in her pocket, and the fact of its being in her possession had induced her to make the midnight visit. She had quieted the babe with laudanum before leaving it in the cottage. The minister sought for Simpson, who could have established the truth of this statement, but he had gone off (in a drunken fit) to the colonies.
Jock felt terribly down-hearted after this. For two or three months he tried in vain to find out his quondam sweetheart. He ascertained that, immediately on her departure from home, she had gone to a small town about thirty miles distant. There she had taken a farmer’s fee, under an assumed name, and had become a farm-servant. He tracked her from this place to Edinburgh, and thence to Glasgow, where he found her, on the point of emigrating to Australia. He repeated the old offer of marriage. But Jessie shook her head. She could never forget his cruel words, she said. The old love was gone; it was never a deep, all-absorbing love, and now it was all gone. She was deaf to his entreaties.
When Jessie Cameron sailed for Australia, the baby went with her; she adopted it then and there, as the only one of its relations who was willing to do so. She went out as a widow. What became of her and the child afterwards, goodness knows. I should like to chronicle some piece of unusual prosperity: but it is impossible. I have told all I know about the matter.
THE BASHKIRS.
The Russian provinces bordering on the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea were, during the last war, in consequence of the drain of troops to the south, partially garrisoned by the Bashkirs, who constitute a specific portion of the Russian army, under the name of the Bashkir force, being divided into cohorts, each of which is commanded by a separate leader, who is always a native Bashkir. During the French invasion and retreat under the First Napoleon the Bashkirs were much more generally armed with bows and arrows instead of muskets than they are at the present day, and from this circumstance they obtained from their invaders the nickname of “Les Amours du Nord.”
The settlements of the Bashkirs are confined to the provinces or governments of Perm and Orenburgh, and their central point, or chief town, is Oufa, which was founded for the express purpose of their government. The Bashkirs submitted themselves voluntarily to the dominion of Russia, in the sixteenth century, shortly after the conquest of the kingdom of Kazan by Ivan the Terrible.
The Bashkirs are all Mahometans; but, from a difference in their mode of life, they may be divided into the stationary and the partially nomadic. The first, being almost entirely occupied with agriculture, reside in villages composed of strongly-built houses; the latter also possess houses, but they are of a slighter construction, and during the two summer months of June and July the Bashkirs abandon them, to wander round about their neighbourhood, for the sake of pasture, as the rearing and feeding of cattle form the exclusive sources of their wealth. During this season they dwell in kibitkas, or koshys, which are portable dwellings, with roofs in the form of a hemisphere, and containing within a good-sized room with a vaulted ceiling. The size of the kibitka varies according to the wants or means of the possessors, but one of medium dimension will measure about six yards in diameter, and it is constructed of five or six frames of trellis-work, which being fastened together by animal sinews or leathern straps constitute its walls. An open space is left between two of these trellis-frames, into which is fitted a wooden doorway to receive a door either of one or two wings. Over and upon the walls is placed the dome, or cupola, consisting of a stout hoop, from which spring a number of shafts all curving inwards and meeting together in the centre of the kibitka. The straight ends of the shafts or poles, projecting below the hoop, are bound to the trellis-frames by thongs or cords. The whole edifice is then covered with long strips of felt, which, among the most wealthy, is of a pure white, but of a grey colour among the poorer people. And, finally, the felt covering is secured by being bound round with hair-bands plaited from the manes and tails of horses, which are cropped for the purpose till they complete the third year of their age. In violent windy weather the kibitka is secured by ropes to several stakes driven into the ground around it.
Within the kibitka the walls are hung round with either cotton or woollen stuffs, and a curtain stretched across, beginning from the door, divides the internal space into two compartments of unequal size, the larger being occupied by the men, and the smaller by the women; but on special occasions of festivity this curtain is removed to