to be of great use to me. They were named Kim and Pak respectively; both are among the commonest family names in Korea, the Kim family having originated at least as early as 57 B.C. Kim was thirty years old and was possessed of a splendid physique. He could take up four hundred pounds of goods and carry them a quarter of a mile without resting. Koreans are taught from childhood to carry heavy weights on their backs. They use a chair-like frame, called a jigi, which distributes the weight evenly over the shoulders and hips and enables them to carry the maximum load with the minimum of fatigue. Kim was always good-natured even under the most discouraging circumstances, and he was fairly honest. Pak was thirty-eight, tall and thin, but enormously strong. He enjoyed the possession of only one eye, for which reason I promptly dubbed him "Dick Deadeye." He was a cautious individual, and always "packed" his money in his clothes, sewed up between the various thicknesses of cloth; and whenever he had a bill to pay and could not avoid payment, he would retire to a secluded place, rip himself open, and return with the money in his hand and a mysterious look on his face, as if he had picked the money off the bushes.

Having secured the services of this precious pair, I promptly marched them off to the store of one Enoch Emory to exchange their loose Korean clothes for something more suited to the work in hand. This Enoch Emory, by the way, is a character unique in Siberian history. When sixteen years old he came out from New England as cabin-boy on a sailing vessel which had been sent by an American company to establish trading stations on the Amur. He left the vessel and went into one of the company's stores. He now "owns" the company and is one of the wealthiest merchants in Siberia. The company operates immense stores in Nikolaievsk, Blagovestchensk, and Khabarovka, with a large receiving store at Vladivostok. Emory always favors American goods and sells immense numbers of agricultural implements and of other things in the manufacture of which America excels. This is the only great American firm in Siberia. Emory makes his home in Moscow and comes out once a year to inspect his stores. He is a typical Yankee of the David Harum stamp.

When my two protégés came to change Korean dress for American it was difficult to decide just where the dress left off and the man began. The Korean bathing habits are like those of the medieval anchorite, and an undergarment, once donned, is lost to memory. Besides the two Koreans, I engaged the services of a Russian secretary named Nicolai Andrev. He was an old man and not by any means satisfactory, but he was the only one I could get who knew the Russian mining laws and who could make out the necessary papers, in case I should have occasion to stake out claims. As it turned out, he hampered the movements of the party at every turn; he could not stand the hard knocks of the journey, and I was obliged to drop him later at the town of Ghijiga. His lack of teeth rendered his pronunciation of Russian so peculiar that he was no help to me in acquiring the language, which is not easy to learn even under the best of circumstances. I was also accompanied by a young Russian naturalist named Alexander Michaelovitch Yankoffsky. As this name was quite too complicated for everyday use, I had my choice of paring it down to "Alek," "Mike," or "Yank," and while my loyalty to Uncle Sam would naturally prompt me to use the last of these I forbore and Alek he became. He did not take kindly to it at first, for it is de rigueur to address a Russian by both his first and second names, the latter being his father's name with vitch attached. This was out of the question, however, and he succumbed to the inevitable.

So our complete party consisted of five men, representing three languages. None of my men knew any English, and I knew neither Russian nor Korean, beyond a few words and phrases. But before two months had elapsed, I had, by the aid of a pocket dictionary, my little stock of Korean words, and a liberal use of pencil and paper, evolved a triglot jargon of English, Korean, and Russian that would have tried the patience of the most charitable philologist.

The steamer was to sail in eight days, and this necessitated quick work in making up my outfit. For guns I picked a twelve-bore German fowling-piece with a rifle-barrel beneath, in order to be equipped for either small or large game without being under the necessity of carrying two guns at once; a Winchester repeating rifle, 45-90; an .88 Mannlicher repeating rifle; and two 45-caliber Colt revolvers. As money is little used among the natives of the far North, it was necessary to lay in a stock of goods to use in trade. For this purpose I secured one thousand pounds of Moharka tobacco. It is put up in four-ounce packages and costs fifteen rouble cents a pound. I procured also two thousand pounds of sugar both for personal use and for trade. This comes in solid loaves of forty pounds each. Next in order came two thousand pounds of brick-tea. Each brick contains three pounds, and in Hankau, where it is put up, it costs twelve and a half cents a brick. It is made of the coarsest of the tea leaves, twigs, dust, dirt, and sweepings, and is the kind universally used by the Russian peasantry. I also secured one hundred pounds of beads, assorted colors, and a goodly stock of needles, together with ten pounds of colored sewing-silks which the natives use to embroider the tops of their boots and the edges of their fur coats. Then came a lot of pipe-bowls at a cent apiece, assorted "jewelry," silver and brass rings, silk handkerchiefs, powder and shot, and 44-caliber cartridges. The last mentioned would be useful in dealing with the natives near the coast, who commonly use Winchester rifles. Those further inland use the old-fashioned musket exclusively.

Korean Miners.

For my own use I laid in a goodly supply of Armour's canned beef, canned fruits, dried fruits, lime-juice, bacon, three thousand pounds of beans, canned tomatoes, tinned butter, coffee, German beef-tea put up in capsules an inch long by half an inch thick (which proved extremely fine), and canned French soups and conserves. Besides these things, and more important than all, I took two tons of black bread—the ordinary hard rye bread of Russia, that requires the use of a prospecting hammer or the butt of a revolver to break it up. This was necessary for barter as well as for personal use.

Judging from my experiences in Australia, Burma, Siam, and Korea, as well as from my reading of Nansen, I thought it best not to encumber myself with any liquors excepting four bottles of brandy, which were carried in the medicine-chest and used for medicinal purposes only. My medical outfit consisted of four main articles, quinine, morphine, iodoform, and cathartic pills. With these four one can cope with almost anything that is likely to happen. The chest contained also bandages, absorbent cotton, mustard leaves, a hot-water bottle, two small surgeon's knives, and a pair of surgical scissors.

After a prolonged search for really good pack-saddles, I concluded that such things were unknown in Siberia; so, calling in a Chinese carpenter, I gave him a model of an Arizona pack-saddle, with instructions to turn out a dozen at the shortest possible notice. I proposed to teach my Koreans how to throw the "diamond hitch," but I found later, to my