the air as I entered the yard, a musty smell, like that of a mixture of oil and cheese. Inside the house was a long, low room, where two or three moon-eyed celestials, clothed in dark blue tunics, lay dreamily on raised couches. On a table near by was a tin of Chinese tobacco and something which looked like an opium pipe. One of them was busy over a little stove preparing some messy dish, some delicacy, such as seaweed, fungus, bird's nest, or some weird edible, the value of which only the Chinese know. At the end of the room there were shelves filled with all sorts of wares—household utensils, cheap crockery, bricks of tea, tobacco and a few articles of Chinese art. On the counter in front of this a Chinaman was sitting with his legs crossed, bargaining with a native over a fur cap. There were tobacco pouches embroidered with Chinese silks, pictures of weird Chinese figures, men with grotesque Chinese faces in even more grotesque attitudes, there were porcelain jars with the willow pattern, delicate paintings of Buddhist gods with forbidding faces, and fire-breathing dragons exquisitely coloured on rice paper. Everything in the house was as weird and uncanny as the inmates themselves, but upon the whole more attractive than repellent in its grotesqueness.
What a contrast indeed to the crude-coloured prints of the Tsar or Russian generals that I used to see in every Siberian trader's house! There could be no doubt as to which of these two peoples were on the higher level of civilization.
But yet I felt ill at ease in this place. I conversed through the medium of Russian with one of the Chinaman. But his cold, uncanny manner reacted upon me. He thought I was a Russian; nor did I
