How different is this Chinese settlement from Mongol Urga! It is a magnified replica of the city at the frontiers. Instead of the straggly avenues a hundred yards broad, with cañon-like alleys flanked by high mud walls, all the streets are so narrow that two strides cross them. They are lined with miniature booths. Through the bars of their paper-paned windows one sees the little delicately-tinted pictures of pagodas and of Chinese girls, in quaint sweeping outlines. Red and black and gold, the New Year placards flame on every post and wall. Lanterns are hung before the gateways; green saplings stand sentinel by the doors; and in the unshuttered compounds innumerable lines of gaudy banners are seen, strung from side to side across the courtyards. From the houses come from time to time a thrumming and a picking of strings in minor music, broken by an occasional clang of cymbals or a drone of beaten drums. You pass a temple of marvelously carved wood, wrought into curves and flowers and arabesques, with eaves turning out into open-mouthed dragons. Everything is brilliant in paint and gilt--a blazing kaleidoscope of color. In a friendly courtyard the horses are tied, and you walk into the teeming streets. All the Chinese of Maimachen and half the Mongols of Urga have come out to-day. Here is a little shifty-eyed Chinese clerk, in his low shoes, with white soles several inches thick, his white stockings, tied at the ankle, showing below the baggy trousers. Here is a young Mongol lama, who hails you gleefully with a Russian word which he has learned from a Buriat, and points out where the procession will emerge. A Mongol woman passes, gorgeously dressed in flowered yellow silk, with red, sable-cuffed sleeves so long as nearly to touch the ground, and her head cuirassed with the burden of silver ornaments. She smiles at the burly Mongol camel-driver who so openly admires her. A Chinese merchant, with red-buttoned cap, attended by a servant, is pushing through the crowd. His looks are surly; perhaps he is thinking of the whereabouts of his own establishment in this carnival. Though the rich and wifeless Chinese may acquire Mongol companions, they cannot buy or give affection. For a poor Mongol, who has the sincerity and humanness which the Chinaman withholds, one of these Mongol concubines will either deceive her master, or, if he object too vigorously, will strip herself of his presents and go to her lover’s _gir_.