The place had electric lights, and from one of the walls hung an ancient European type of telephone, which was frequently jangling or enduring the shrieks of one or another bureaucrat, but which never seemed to bring or transmit any information. Most of the functionaries, big sturdy men who would have looked more at home herding cattle on the plains, squatted near little tables or desks, a foot high, some smoking long pipes with tiny bowls and much silver decoration, others rocking idly back and forth, while their greasy pigtails, swaying to and fro, increased the soiled line they had already drawn down the backs of their gowns. A few were working; that is, writing in their national script, so different from Chinese, on long strips of cheap tissue-paper folded lengthwise and opening like an accordion. Their pens were the camel’s-hair brushes common to the Far East, however, of which each man carried two in a silver scabbard hanging from his girdle; their ink was taken from a little flat stone on which they rubbed their pens sidewise, and their writing-desks were thin squares of board held on their left hands. A big dinner-bell in a corner of the room served to call attendants, or to summon prisoners for the next case to be tried. For justice was being dispensed, leisurely but steadily, all the time we were there. In the center of the raised platform, opposite the door and in the chief place of honor, squatted an imposing man who might easily have been taken for an unusually burly Chinaman, in his darker gown, his mandarin cap with a colored button, his oily cue, and his rimless ear-piece glasses. He was fat, and he was fully aware of his own importance in the Mongolian scheme of things. From time to time a group of prisoners was brought in by one of the coal-bin soldiers, always armed with a fixed bayonet. The accused, all ragged, shivering, and visibly hungry, looking as if they had been living for weeks in an underground dungeon and had been periodically beaten half to death, were forced to kneel on the bare floor and bow their heads down to it several times as an obeisance to the haughty judge. If they failed to do so promptly, they were prodded or thumped to their knees by the soldier. The trial consisted merely of the judge’s questioning the cringing prisoner, during which his honor smoked, stretched himself, and spat copiously on the floor in front of the kneeling culprits. When he was done, he growled out something which may or may not have been a sentence, and the prisoners were led away again. Of the score or more tried while we were there none was released.