"globe-trotter" from the United States. My professional and patriotic pride would not allow me to admit for a moment that All the Year Round 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 patriotism. 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 darkness 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-Baikál 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 Kiákhta and went with the boundary commissioner, Mr. Sulkófski, to call upon the Chinese governor of Maimáchin. The Mongolian town of Maimáchin is separated from Kiákhta by a hundred and fifty or two hundred yards of
