countries, and bring articles of home manufacture to exchange for “store goods.”  The features of the people are unmistakable testimony of their Mongolian origin.  They are short of stature, with broad, flat faces, high cheek bones and bright, smiling eyes wide apart.  The men grow no beards, but have long pigtails of coarse coal-black hair.  The women are sturdy, good-natured and unembarrassed; they are adorned with a great quantity of jewelry, chiefly of silver, but often of gold.  They wear circlets around their heads made of coral, turquoise, amber, agate, jade or other precious stones, with five or six necklaces and enormous girdles of the same material.  Huge ear rings, four or five inches long, pull down the lobes of their ears.  Their wrists are heavy with bracelets, their limbs with anklets, and their fingers are half hidden with rings.  The entire fortune of a family is usually invested in personal adornments for the women members.  They find this much safer than savings banks.

The attention of the world has recently been attracted in that direction because of an unusual and very significant movement of the Indian government, which, in the winter of 1904, took advantage of the embarrassments of Russia in the farther East, and sent a military expedition over the northern border on the pretext of escorting a diplomatic mission.  Colonel Younghusband was sent as an envoy extraordinary—­very extraordinary—­for, with 2,500 British soldiers, he was instructed to make a treaty of commerce and good will with the Grand Lama of Thibet, and his orders were to stay at Lhassa until the treaty was negotiated and as much longer as was necessary to compel the Thibetans to respect its terms and carry out its stipulations.  That means the permanent occupation of Lhassa by a British army and the opening of an unknown and mysterious region to trade.

Thibet is the unknown, mysterious country of the world, a land of desert and mountains inhabited by a primitive and bigoted people, who have for many years been under the protection of China, and paid tribute to the emperor until the late war with Japan in 1895.  After the result of that conflict became known they seemed to lose their respect for and confidence in their protectors and have sent no envoys or money to Peking since.  We know very little about Thibet.  Foreigners are not permitted to enter the country, and only a few venturesome explorers have endured the hardships and faced the dangers of a visit to that forbidden land.  Indeed, it is so perilous an undertaking that a skeptical public frequently takes the liberty to doubt the statements of the men who have gone there.  But all agree that it is the hermit of nations, and its people are under the control of cruel and ignorant Buddhist priests, who endeavor to prevent them from acquiring any modern customs or ideas.  One of the objects of Colonel Younghusband’s expedition is to change this situation and persuade the ignorant and bigoted ecclesiastics who govern Thibet to open