gistrate,
tickled with the Tartar's ingenuity, gave him the benefit of the clerk's
dull roguery, and dismissed the charge; but not so the accusers, who were
well bastinadoed, and would have been put to death as coiners, had they
not found means to appease justice by the present of some ingots of purer
metal. It is only, however, upon very rare and extraordinary occasions
that the Mongols get the better of the Chinese. In the ordinary course
of things, they are everywhere, and always, and in every way, the dupes
of their neighbours who by dint of cunning and unprincipled machinations,
reduce them to poverty.

Upon receiving our sapeks, we proceeded to buy the winter clothing we
needed. Upon a consideration of the meagreness of our exchequer, we came
to the resolution that it would be better to purchase what we required at
some secondhand shop. In China and Tartary no one has the smallest
repugnance to wear other people's clothes; he who has not himself the
attire wherein to pay a visit or make a holiday, goes without ceremony to
a neighbour and borrows a hat, or a pair of trousers, or boots, or shoes,
or whatever else he wants, and nobody is at all surprised at these
borrowings, which are quite a custom. The only hesitation any one has in
lending his clothes to a neighbour, is, lest the borrower should sell
them in payment of some debt, or, after using them, pawn them. People
who buy clothes buy them indifferently, new or secondhand. The question
of price is alone taken into consideration, for there is no more delicacy
felt about putting on another man's hat or trousers, than there is about
living in a house that some one else has occupied before you.

This custom of wearing other people's things was by no means to our
taste, and all the less so, that, ever since our arrival at the mission
of Si-Wang, we had not been under the necessity of departing from our old
habits in this respect. Now, however, the slenderness of our purse
compelled us to waive our repugnance. We went out, therefore, in search
of a secondhand clothes shop, of which, in every town here, there are a
greater or less number, for the most part in connection with pawnshops,
called in these countries Tang-Pou. Those who borrow upon pledges, are
seldom able to redeem the articles they have deposited, which they
accordingly leave to die, as the Tartars and Chinese express it; or in
other words, they allow the period of redemption to pass, and the