"Exactly," cried the soldier. "That's what I thought. That accounts for it."
"I don't see how," the artist declared; "that 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."