It has always seemed to me that the songs of a people, and especially of a people who have composed them themselves, and not adopted them from others, are indicative to a very great degree of their character; whether, as some author supposed, the songs have a reflex influence on the character, or whether they exist simply as its exponents, the result is the same, viz., a greater or less correspondence between the two. In none of the Siberian tribes is this more marked than in the Kamchadals. They have evidently never been a warlike, combative people. They have no songs celebrating the heroic deeds of their ancestors, or their exploits in the chase or in battle, as have many tribes of our North American Indians. Their ballads are all of a melancholy, imaginative character, inspired apparently by grief, love, or domestic feeling, rather than by the ruder passions of pride, anger, and revenge. Their music all has a wild, strange sound to a foreign ear, but it conveys to the mind in some way a sense of sorrow, and vague, unavailing regret for something that has for ever passed away, like the emotion excited by a funeral dirge over the grave of a dear friend. As Ossian says of the music of Carryl, "it is like the memory of joys that are past--sweet, yet mournful to the soul." I remember particularly a song called the Penzhinski, sung one night by the natives at Lesnoi, which was, without exception, the sweetest, and yet the most inexpressibly mournful combination of notes that I had ever heard. It was a wail of a lost soul, despairing, yet pleading for mercy. I tried in vain to get a translation of the words. Whether it was the relation of some bloody and disastrous encounter with their fiercer northern neighbours, or the lament over the slain body of some dear son, brother, or husband, I could not learn; but the music alone will bring the tears near one's eyes, and has an indescribable effect upon the singers, whose excitable feelings it sometimes works up almost to the pitch of frenzy. The dancing tunes of the Kamchadals are of course entirely different in character, being generally very lively, and made up of energetic staccato passages, repeated many times in succession, without variation. Nearly all the natives accompany themselves upon a three-cornered guitar with two strings, called a _ballalaika_ (bahl-lah-lai'-kah), and some of them play quite well upon rude home-made violins. All are passionately fond of music of every kind.