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chants in snow-white clothes and tiny jeweler's turbans invite one to their white, washed, felt-floored inner rooms; and there, treading cat-like in stockinged feet, they unroll gold and silver embroideries, Kashmir shawls, and "camble's-hair" stuffs, and cover the last inches of floor space with jewels. Necklaces, girdles, and a queen's ornaments are drawn from battered boxes, scraps of paper, cotton cloth, or old flannel. Nothing seems quite as incongruous in this land of the misfit and the incongruous as the way in which the jewels of a raja are produced from old biscuit-tins, pickle-bottles, and marmalade-jars. One buys the gems of a temple goddess, and they are laid in grimy cotton-wool and packed in rusty little tin boxes of a crudity inconceivable. While on the claim the Klondike miner considers the makeshift of a baking-powder box, as a safe deposit for his nuggets and dust, as a huge joke; but the Hindu jeweler does it with no sense of the unfitness of things, of relative propriety in splendor. "Memsahib does not like tin box? Very well. See!" and the ruby necklace was wrapped in a bit of newspaper, and put in a broken pasteboard box that had held a druggist's prescription. When they have covered the floor with their most valuable stuffs, the shopmen walk over them without compunction, pull them here and there, and throw them in heaps into the corners. When this happens several times a day, and the traps are bundled to and from the hotels night and morning, it is small wonder that everything offered one is mussy, wrinkled, and shop-worn. Despite the