A RIDE THROUGH THE TRANS-BAIKAL 107

" globe-trotter" from the United States. My professional and patriotic pride would not allow me to admit for a moment that All the Year Bound might have a larger circulation in outer Mongolia than The Century Magazine. After long and diligent search in a queer, dark, second-hand booth kept by a swarthy Mongol, I was rewarded by the discovery of a product of American genius that partly satisfied my patriotism, and served as a tangible proof that New England marks the time to which all humanity keeps step. It was an old, second-hand clock, made in Providence, Rhode Island, the battered and somewhat grimy face of which still bore in capital letters the characteristic American legend, " Thirty Hour Joker." Mongolia might know nothing of American literature or of American magazines, but it had made the acquaintance of the American clock; and although this particular piece of mechanism had lost its hands, its " Thirty Hour Joker" was a sufficiently pointed allusion to the national characteristic to satisfy the most ardent patriot- ism. An American joker does not need hands to point out the merits of his jokes, and this mutilated New England clock, with its empty key-hole eyes and its battered but still humorous visage, seemed to leer at me out of the dark- ness of that queer, old, second-hand shop as if to say, " You may come to Siberia, you may explore Mongolia, but you can't get away from the American joker." I was a little disappointed not to find in this bazar some representative masterpiece of American literature, but I was more than satisfied a short time afterward when I discovered in a still wilder and more remote part of the Trans-Baikal a copy of Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi," and a Russian translation of Bret Harte's " Luck of Roaring Camp." On Friday, October 2d, Mr. Frost and I again visited Kiakhta and went with the boundary commissioner, Mr. Sulkofski, to call upon the Chinese governor of Maimachin. The Mongolian town of Maimachin is separated from

Kiakhta by a hundred and fifty or two hundred yards of