"To Pekin, like that Russian major who is sitting near the captain of
the _Astara_."

I looked at the man indicated. He was about fifty years of age, of true
Muscovite type, beard and hair turning gray, face prepossessing. I knew
Russian: he ought to know French. Perhaps he was the fellow traveler of
whom I had dreamed.

"You said he was a major, Mr. Ephrinell?"

"Yes, a doctor in the Russian army, and they call him Major Noltitz."

Evidently the American was some distance ahead of me, and yet he was
not a reporter by profession.

As the rolling was not yet very great, we could dine in comfort.
Ephrinell chatted with Miss Horatia Bluett, and I understood that there
was an understanding between these two perfectly Anglo-Saxon natures.

In fact, one was a traveler in teeth and the other was a traveler in
hair. Miss Horatia Bluett represented an important firm in London,
Messrs. Holmes-Holme, to whom the Celestial Empire annually exports two
millions of female heads of hair. She was going to Pekin on account of
the said firm, to open an office as a center for the collection of the
Chinese hair crop. It seemed a promising enterprise, as the secret
society of the Blue Lotus was agitating for the abolition of the
pigtail, which is the emblem of the servitude of the Chinese to the
Manchu Tartars. "Come," thought I, "if China sends her hair to England,
America sends her teeth: that is a capital exchange, and everything is
for the best."