A big Celestial with a fuse comes hastily through the gateway from which the procession is to emerge. The crash of his firecrackers startles the Mongol ponies pushed close along the houses. Beneath the multi-colored gateway, next pour out a score of horsemen with pennanted spears. They ride two by two, in white coats with red letters on their breasts. Then comes a crowd of footmen, who fill the street in a torrent. The curious Mongols press to each side, and watch the procession of their alien overlords. Two ranks are robed in vivid red, and carry poles with big gold knobs. Blue-coated Chinamen, with cymbals and shrilling fifes, follow; then come more horsemen; then the great silken umbrella, and a gray-mustached dignitary on horseback,--the chief of police; next, more fifers and wand-carriers, six abreast. With fireworks and clashing music, the vivid ranks in red and blue, and yellow and gold, and green and purple, and every other conceivable combination of hues, make their way around the stockade and back again through the gated city. The crowd seems to be trending now toward a brilliantly colored archway spanning the main street. With the Mongol holiday-makers we follow along into a cloistered courtyard flanked by peaked temple-like houses. A crowd of Chinese is pressing around some one clad in blue, who has just stepped out between the beater of a tom-tom and an artist with a big pair of cymbals. A preliminary flourish introduces the performer--a pasty-faced young Chinaman. He starts a rhythmic chant whose cadence is within a note or two of one of the old crooning Negro melodies of our South. Over and over again he chants it. A poet this is. He has conned his verses, and now comes out to sing them. He ends with a special swirl in what is evidently a very comic climax. The drum and cymbals crash out once more, and another chanter comes--this one old and feeble, with a curiously penetrating voice. He drones a long hexameter-footed epic, in which the harsh Chinese _gh_ and _wh_ sounds are not so coarsely enunciated as in the poem of the first reciter. “That is one of the old legend-singers,” you are told. It is such a ballad as Homer sang, or the Welsh bards chanted. It is the poetry and the history of the long past, the immemorial past, far before the infancy of other nations; for China keeps alive her antiquity, and in her old age never forgets. [Illustration: CHINESE ARCHWAY, URGA MAIMACHEN]