sees the huge sheet of mist on the horizon, which, as it rolls nearer and nearer, and its features become more definite, reveals camels, and horses, and human beings in myriads, and announces the advent of, etc. etc.!  In Kien Long’s own narrative he is not there at all, having expected indeed the arrival of the Kalmuck host, but having deputed the military and commissariat arrangements for the reception of them to his trusted officer, Chouhede; and his first sight of any of them is when their chiefs are brought to him, by the imperial post-road, to his quarters a good way off, where they are honorably entertained, and whence they accompany him to his summer residence of Ge-hol. (2) De Quincey’s closing account of the monument in memory of the Tartar transmigration which Kien Long caused to be erected, and his copy of the fine inscription on the monument, are not in accord with the Chinese statements respecting that matter.  ’Mighty columns of granite and brass erected by the Emperor Kien Long near the banks of the Ily’ is De Quincey’s description of the monument.  The account given of the affair by the mandarin Yu-min-tchoung, in his comment on the Emperor’s Memoir, is very different.  ’The year of the arrival of the Torgouths,’ he says, ’chanced to be precisely that in which the Emperor was celebrating the eightieth year of the age of his mother the Empress-Dowager.  In memory of this happy day his Majesty had built on the mountain which shelters from the heat (Pi-chou-chan) a vast and magnificent miao, in honor of the reunion of all the followers of Fo in one and the same worship; it had just been completed when Oubache and the other princes of his nation arrived at Ge-hol.  In memory of an event which has contributed to make this same year forever famous in our annals, it has been his Majesty’s will to erect in the same miao a monument which should fix the epoch of the event and attest its authenticity; he himself composed the words for the monument and wrote the characters with his own hand.  How small the number of persons that will have an opportunity of seeing and reading this monument within the walls of the temple in which it is erected!’ Moreover the words of the monumental inscription in De Quincey’s copy of it are hardly what Kien Long would have written or could have authorized.  ’Wandering sheep who have strayed away from the Celestial Empire in the year 1616’ is the expression in De Quincey’s copy for that original secession of the Torgouth Tartars from their eastern home on the Chinese borders for transference of themselves far west to Russia, which was repaired and compensated by their return in 1771 under their Khan Oubache.  As distinctly, on the other hand, the memoir of Kien Long refers the date of the original secession to no farther back than the reign of his own grandfather, the Emperor Kang Hi, when Ayouki, the grandfather of Oubache, was Khan of the Torgouths, and induced them to part company with their overbearing kinsmen the Eleuths, and seek refuge within the Russian territories on the Volga.  In the comment of the Chinese mandarin on the Imperial Memoir the time is more exactly indicated by the statement that the Torgouths had remained ‘more than seventy years’ in their Russian settlements when Oubache brought them back.  This would refer us to about 1700, or, at farthest, to between 1690 and 1700, for the secession under Ayouki.