t is, unless you mean to
suggest that the Czar confiscated the little American girl's birthday
and sent it to Siberia."

"It's plain enough," the soldier returned. "We have the reformed
calendar, the Gregorian calendar, you know, and the Russians haven't.
They keep the old Julian calendar, and it's now ten days behind ours.
They celebrate Christmas three days after we have begun the new year.
So if the little girl left St. Petersburg in a Russian ship on February
10, 1804, by the old reckoning, and was on the water two weeks, she
would land in England after March 1st by the new calendar."

"That is to say," the artist inquired, "the little girl came into an
English port thinking she was going to have her birthday the next week,
and when she set foot on shore she found out that her birthday was
passed the week before. Is that what you mean?"

"Yes," answered the soldier; and the mathematician nodded also.

"Then all I have to say," the artist continued, "is that it was a mean
trick to play on a child that had been looking forward to her first
birthday for eight years--to knock her into the middle of next week in
that fashion!"

"And she had to go four years more for her next chance," said the
journalist. "Then she would be twelve. But you said she hadn't a
birthday till she was sixteen. How did she lose the one she was
entitled to in 1808? She wasn't on a Russian ship again, was she?"

"No," the mathematician replied; "she was on an American ship that
time."

"On the North Sea?" asked the artist.

"No," was the calm answer; "on the Pacific."

"Sailing east or west?" cried the soldier.

"Sailing east," answered the professor of mathematics, smiling again.

"Then I see how it might happen," the soldier declared.

"Well, I don't," confessed the artist.

The journalist said nothing, as it seemed unprofessional to admit
ignorance of anything.

"It is simple enough," the soldier explained. "You see, the world is
revolving about the sun steadily, and it is always high noon somewhere
on the globe. The day rolls round unceasing, and it is not cut off into
twenty-four hours. We happen to have taken the day of Greenwich or
Paris as the day of civilization, and we say that it begins earlier in
China and later in California; but it is all the same day, we say.
Therefore there has to be some place out in the middle of the Pacific
Ocean where we lose or gain a day--if we are going east, we gain it; if
we are going wes