Our good British host of Sian-fu conceived the nefarious project of sending us on to Lanchow in “Peking carts”; but the few unavoidable churnings in those of the Tuchun had firmly convinced us that anything else was preferable. Anything else boiled down to a single choice,—the transformation of pack-mules in the postal service into riding-animals by the simple expedient of disguising them as such with the American army saddles and bridles we had brought with us. For militarists had drained the provinces of horses; good riding-mules could be bought, if at all, only for a fortune, and could not be hired for so long and hazardous a journey under any circumstances. We took two carts also, it is true, a “large” and a “small” one in Chinese parlance, though the difference in size was not great and the three mules of the one hardly better than the two of the other. But these were for the baggage and our two servants.

An inventory of the whole expedition may be mildly of interest, not so much for the information of other travelers as to show that the most modest of foreigners can scarcely escape a princely retinue when they travel in the interior of China. The “large” cart exacted forty-four dollars; the small one twenty-seven dollars; each pack-mule sixteen dollars, with a dollar “tea-money” at the end (specified in the contract). This included a driver for each cart, a mafu, or groom, on foot to attend to the riding-animals—for most of the way, it turned out, we had two of them—all self-sustaining, except their mere lodging at inns and, of course, a certain inevitable “squeeze” through understandings with innkeepers. For a journey of fifteen hundred li, or four hundred and fifty miles, the sum total did not seem excessive, particularly as it was merely in “Mex” and but little more than half what it would have been in American currency. The trip, we learned, was usually divided into eighteen stages and could scarcely be made with such an outfit in less than sixteen days. We took the precaution of promising a dollar a day cumshaw to each of the cart-drivers for every day they bettered the ordinary schedule.

Fifty li beyond Sian-fu the alleged road went down into the broad river-bed of the Wei, a sturdy tributary of the Hoang Ho and in certain seasons several times wider than it was now. Far out at the edge of the water was gathered a mighty multitude waiting for the very inadequate ferry to set them across to the large walled town of Sienyang on the further shore. A typical Chinese ferry is a marvelous example of the worst way to cross a river, and this one was no exception to the rule. Out in the sand close alongside the still broad stream there were densely crowded together, in all the disorder of which the Chinese, who are adepts at it, are capable, carts piled high with all sorts of awkward cargo, mules, donkeys, and a few old hacks of horses, all under cumbersome packs, laden wheelbarrows by the score, and coolies without number, each carrying with him a donkey-load of something or other. All this assortment, not to mention dozens of mere Chinese travelers of less good-natured mien than the coolies, and all sorts of journeying odds and ends scattered through the throng, was lying in wait for one of three clumsy, home-made barges which at long intervals poled and singsonged themselves from shore to shore. Wherever a Chinese crowd gathers there quickly flock those eager to minister to its wants, so that out here on the bare sand there had sprung up several straw-mat restaurants, a shoemaker’s hasty establishment, a blacksmith-shop, which could have been packed up entire in five minutes and carried off over the smithy’s shoulder, for those who wished to take advantage of the delay by having a horse shod or some unavoidable repair done, while the hawkers of everything hawkable to such customers struggled through the chaotic mob chanting their wares in all the tones from diphtheritic hoarseness to the shrillest of falsettos. Then of course there were the inevitable beggars, young and old, sickly and sturdy, slinking in and out through every possible opening.

It would have been un-Chinese to take turns or conform to any other system that might have made easier the task in hand, so that when the first of the three craft, more overloaded than any American “trolley” in the rush hour, began to show signs of where it purposed to land, there was a helter-skelter in that direction which resulted in many personal discomfitures. Luckily foreigners are usually given a wide berth in such stampedes; whether it is out of sheer respect or merely due to some old tradition of one of these strange-looking “outside-country people” suddenly “making his hand into a ball” and chastising in an unprecedented manner those who were so unfortunate as to jostle him, there is almost always alacrity and generally respectful cheerfulness in giving one of them full right of way. Personally we might not have taken advantage of this attitude and made chaos more chaotic by demanding first place; but Chang, like any Chinese in the service of a foreigner, could not resist impressing that fact upon his fellow-countrymen; and before we realized it he had somehow forced our expedition to the front at the spot where the boat at last concluded to ground. For it would not have been conventional to prepare a place where the craft might actually land, any more than it would have been for it to carry a real gang-plank in place of the two warped and writhing slabs that were at length disentangled from the welter of everything on board and slid over the side. For one thing, a real gang-plank could probably not have survived some band of thieves for a single night; for another, how could the swarms of tattered men hanging about either shore earn their meager food if carts and wheelbarrows could be gotten aboard without their assistance? Had there been any suggestion of authority to keep the one throng back far enough for the other to disembark, the boat’s stay might at least have been cut in half. But China is preËminently the land of individual rather than communal liberty, and there ensued something superior by many times to any college rush. That a few who wished to disembark had been swept back again upon the boat, and vice versa, was of course no unusual experience. When at last comparative quiet began to settle down about us, and the half-dozen polemen at the stern took up their weird chantey, we found that while we ourselves and most of our animals were on board none of our carts had won the mÊlÉe. Carts could not get on board under their own natural motive-power, but, having been unhitched, they must be bodily lifted and shouldered up the crazy substitutes for gang-planks.

Though the opposite shore was a stone-paved road close under the city wall, landing facilities were far worse than where we had embarked. For one thing, the craft grounded fully ten feet from shore and could not be coaxed to move in either direction until all the coolies, who made up three fourths of the passenger-list, had been driven overboard, packs and all, and left to scramble as best they could up the stone facing of the bank. Many of them were carrying cotton in loose bundles or in high cone-shaped baskets, and now and then in their shrieking, disorganized struggles a boll or two of the precious stuff fell into the muddy water. The dismay at such a disaster, though only on the part of the owner or carrier, who screamed with excitement until he had rescued the threatened bit of property, was not merely both absurd and pathetic, but a striking commentary on the poverty of China’s great masses. Eventually the boat was poled close enough to what should and could easily have been a stone runway so that the frightened animals could be forced to walk the teetering plank without more than two or three of them falling overboard, and some two hours after we had reached the river our own carts were manhandled ashore from a following boat and our expedition was once more organized.

Thousands of people, and probably at least hundreds of carts, cross the Wei at Sienyang every day in the year, and have done so for centuries; yet the several simple little improvements that would make the crossing a brisk matter of routine have evidently never been thought of—except by critical foreigners—much less ever attempted. No Chinese concerned would feel really happy if the thing were not done in the very hardest possible way consistent with its being accomplished at all; that would make him feel out of touch with his worshiped ancestors. Besides, whom do you expect to make those improvements? Not the local authorities, for they probably get more “squeeze” under the present system; not the boatmen, for the longer the boat is in loading the fewer times they will have to pole it across; not, certainly, the flocks of hangers-on who find in the difficulties of embarking and disembarking their only source of livelihood; and surely not the passenger, for his only interest is to get across, not to make it easier for other people, for whose weal or woe he has a Chinaman’s supreme indifference.

Beyond Sienyang the whole dust-hazy landscape was covered as far as the eye could see with graves, not the little conical spatters of earth to be seen in myriads all over China, but immense mounds by the score, some of them veritable mountains—and nowhere a touch of any color but the yellow brown of rainless autumn. Once perhaps there had been small forests about these tombs, but at most now there was left a rare broken stone horse of clumsy workmanship and perhaps the remnants of a few other more or less mythological beasts. What noble beings had been worthy the heavy task of piling these great hills over their mortal remains, or when they had graced the earth, no one along the way could tell us. Once or twice a day we passed a huge oblong old bell of elaborate design that had once hung in a temple, and was now rusting away in some moistureless mud-hole, like the abandoned sugar-kettles which litter several islands of the West Indies. Perhaps the temples themselves had fallen entirely away again into the dust from which even holy edifices are constructed in the loess country, and left these abandoned bells as the only remembrance of their former existence. Sometimes one of these had been rescued, whether out of piety, superstition, or some lucrative inspiration, and hung in the one and only tree of which an occasional larger village boasted.

On the second midday we lunched in a cave, and paid even for the water drunk by the mules, as well as their chopped straw and beans; or at least their owners did. In fact, cave dwellings had become almost universal, and were to remain so for many days to come; villages, whole towns of caves, stretched in row after row up the face of great loess cliffs, like the terraced fields that covered every foot of the mountainous world from river-bottom to the crest of the farthest visible range. In all this tumbled expanse often the only touch of color was the persimmons, like big orange-tinted tomatoes—persimmons by the ox-cart-load; wheelbarrows creaking under their double straw boxes of persimmons; baskets of them hanging from the shoulder-poles of jogging coolies; wandering persimmon-sellers everywhere singing their merits; millions of them for sale, millions more being dried in the sun. Even the dust which covered everything and everybody without distinction could not disguise the persimmons’ splash of color, nor hamper the natives from wolfing them entire as often as their worldly wealth warranted the acquisition of one. Dust and skin aside, we also found them the best thing late autumn had to offer—a drink, a lunch, and a dessert all in one.

We crawled out of our sleeping-bags at five each morning and were off at six, except on the few days when we varied that program by making it an hour earlier. With the sun so low that it only overtook us some twenty li away, those daily departures were not only dark but increasingly cold. For though men working in the fields were still sometimes stripped to the waist, at least when the cloudless sun was high, as late as the tenth of November, any suggestion of shadow or of night air became more tinged with serious meaning as the earth underfoot rose higher and higher above sea-level. The roads for the most part were still caÑons, sometimes mightier caÑons than we had even yet seen; at others they clambered over loess ridges and hills, gashing themselves deeply into these wherever time, traffic, and soil coincided sufficiently to do so. In strict speech there were no roads at all, as there seldom are anywhere in China; not that they were merely atrocious routes of transportation, but because the Chinese scheme of things does not make provision even for a place on which to build a road. Every foot of territory pays a land-tax; the unfortunate landholder on whose property the public chooses to trespass in its strenuous struggles to get itself and its produce from one place to another must pay for that which belongs to him only in name. The result is that a road is a homeless orphan, welcome nowhere, driven from field to field, and ruthlessly done away with by plow or shovel whenever an opportunity offers. The attempts of each of China’s myriad tillers of the soil to chase the un-public highway off his own precious little patches of earth, added to the fact that a driver has only a limited control over the wanderings of his lead-mule, and has no training in directness and time-saving himself, make the average Chinese road the most incredible example of aimless wandering on the face of the earth. There are no fences in this land of walls; the Chinese walls in his home, his towns, his country, but never his fields, which would seem to need it most. For traffic has not the slightest consideration for the damage it may do. It marches serenely over newly planted grain or ripening crops whenever there is the least incentive to do so, and the only redress of the owner is some such feeble protest as digging traverse trenches at frequent intervals along the edge of his land in the usually vain hope that carts will be obliged to keep outside them, or to take advantage of some favorable season of slight travel to uproot the pesky road and throw it away entirely.

There were defiles so narrow through the great loess caÑons that carts could not have passed a sedan-chair; and through these came such a constant train of traffic that it is strange the lighter west-bound travel moved at all. Ponderous two-wheeled carts, weighing several times as much as our farm-wagons, drawn by six or seven mules, were not uncommon. All had at least three animals, one in the shafts—and many of these shaft-mules were splendid specimens of mulehood—the rest in front in pairs or trios, with perhaps a lone lead-mule setting the pace. Rope traces running through a large iron ring suspended from each of the shafts attached all the animals directly to the axle. A Chinese shaft-mule’s life is no sinecure. At every incessant bump and lurch of the massive cart he is similarly jolted by the two cumbersome logs that imprison him; if the cart overturns he must go with it; and all day long his head is held painfully erect, not by a mere bit, but by a rawhide thong between his upper lip and the gums. The other animals get off little more cheaply, and with the wicked loads of wheat in long slender bags which endlessly poured in past us from the west, the gasping of the animals as they toiled in the deep sand-like loess, particularly when the caÑon led steeply upward over the high ridges which here and there cut across the route, was like the death-rattle of beasts suddenly stricken down.

Under each axle of these carts hung a long bell of cylinder shape, and the dull booming of scores of these could be heard for miles before or behind them. Apparently these wheat-trains traveled day and night. We met them at dawn with all the signs of having already been on the road for hours; all through the night the booming of passing carts could be heard by any one who cared to lie awake; very rarely did we come upon them halted long enough even to feed the jaded animals. There were at least two men on every load, one, whom we suspected to be the driver off duty, stretched out at full length and apparently sleeping as soundly as if the jolting, careening sacks of wheat were a sailor’s hammock. There was really nothing strange in this; the Chinese are trained from birth to sleep under all manner of catch-as-catch-can conditions. With the loess soil constantly swirling about under the least disturbing circumstances, and with a high wind often blowing, the Chinese on their carts, as well as those astride or afoot for that matter, looked ludicrously like an endless procession of clowns with flour-powdered faces, or of mimes wearing death-masks.

Here and there the file was broken by some more leisurely conveyance,—a cart with an ox in the shafts and perhaps a steer and a donkey in front, sometimes with still more incongruous combinations. The narrow caÑons were often so congested with beast-drawn traffic that the hundreds of wheelbarrows had to join the pole-shouldering coolies and other pedestrians on the paths along the cliffs high above. These tui-chu (push-carts), as the Chinese call them, had every manner of aid, from a child to a donkey, which we had seen in use in the wheelbarrow brigades east of Sian-fu, and one ingenious fellow had rigged up a large sail over his load and was creaking along nicely before the strong west wind. I never ceased to wonder where the never ending stream of coolies was coming and going from and to, and why. Their toilsome tramps to change places, bag and baggage, seemed a mere waste of effort, like carrying sand from one river-bed to another.

The coolies of Shensi, or at least most of those we saw in that province, seem to long to be mistaken for scholars—an honor, of course, which would bring joy to any Chinese heart, in contrast to the insult it would often convey in some other lands. Some clever salesman had profited by this strange Celestial longing by selling to more than half the coolies we met a huge pair of rimless spectacles made of plain plate-glass, and of course of no optical value whatever. Had they been in the form of goggles, one might have concluded that they were merely a protection from the dust, but there was nothing about them that could by any stretch even of a coolie imagination be considered anything but ornamental.

Cues have appreciably decreased in China since the fall of the alien dynasty which required them as a badge of submission; but once a custom is established among the conservative Chinese it is harder to eradicate than ragweed, however uncomplimentary may have been its origin. It may be a slight exaggeration to say that every other man we met on our western trip wore a cue, but certainly there is still wound about coolie heads material enough for all the hair-nets that America can consume in another century. Old men, though only a tiny gray braid may be left them, would, it is said, “rather lose their heads than their tails.” In this west country boys are as likely to be adorned with them as not; in any busy street the itinerant hair-dresser may be seen combing out the long black tresses of his coolie clients, calmly seated out of doors even in the depths of winter, and often adding a switch for good measure. Among upper-class Chinese the cue has largely disappeared, but with the masses it is as common a feature in many provinces as the long pipes protruding from the backs of coolie necks when not in use.

A corpse journeying to its ancestral home between two pole-joined mules, the white rooster demanded by ancient custom sitting on top of the ponderous coffin in a little wicker cage, was one of the infrequent, though not rare, sights of the journey. Sometimes we met a long file of black pigs moving slowly eastward under the impulse of several patient men, one marching in front unarmed, the rest with very long but rather harmless whips, and all singing to coax on their charges. It was an addition to my slight knowledge of natural history to learn that hogs are moved by music; but there is no telling what Chinese music may accomplish until it has been tried. We rode, of course, or rested our cramped legs by walking, up out of the caÑons as much as possible. Here the variance in the point at which a man or a mule registers dizziness sometimes led to serious differences of opinion between ourselves and our mounts. Along most of the cliffs high above the sunken roads there are several paths, some of them already appreciably wearing down toward the ultimate common level, others narrow ridges of a rather harder streak of earth with barely room on them for two feet at a time. Invariably, whenever there was a choice in paths, the mule would choose the one closest to the edge of the road chasm, the very edge of it, if possible, often with a sheer drop of a hundred feet or more directly under the off stirrup—and the loess soil everywhere seeming ready to collapse at any moment. Sometimes a path worked its way out on the face of the cliff before one noticed, to where it would have been as impossible to dismount as to turn about, and the helpless rider could only prayerfully intrust his future to the mule, wholly free apparently from any suggestion of the trepidation which ran in hot sprays up the human spine. Certainly a mule has no worry-bacteria in his system—and probably has fewer troubles in a lifetime than almost any other living creature, which should be food for reflection to worrying humanity. Once I had the hair-lifting experience of seeing most of the rear end of the major’s mule just in front of me go over the cliff with a crumbling bit of path, but the animal never for a moment lost his mulish poise, nor hesitated when the next chance offered to take the most edgy of the paths again.

On the evening of the second day out of Sian-fu our muleteers respectfully sent word that they would like us to start “ten li earlier” next morning, “because the road went up-stairs.” That was one of the contrasts between Chinese mule-drivers and those, for instance, of South America. Here they were always ready to start at any hour we named, and sometimes asked us to advance it. We accordingly got up three miles earlier, and before the day was done congratulated ourselves on having done so. All morning the road, freeing itself from loess caÑons and taking to river-valleys and ever higher plains, ascended at so gradual a pace that we hardly realized we were rising unless we glanced back at the lower and lower world behind. But just beyond the village where we made our usual hour-and-a-half noonday halt, the earth surged up like some tidal wave suddenly commanded to stand still. The road did indeed go up-stairs; nothing could have been a more exact description of its zigzagging course, which at length, hours after we had left the village, brought us in straggling formation to the summit, four thousand feet above it, then plunged even more swiftly down into the bed of a slight stream which trickled away through a region of huge rocks and a formation for a time more solid than pure loess. But this was only a brief and imperfect respite. The crumbling soil soon monopolized the landscape again, and for many days afterward filled our eyes and nostrils with its stifling and all-penetrating dust. Peculiar sights, indeed, the loess often gives. Fertile enough with sufficient water, one might easily have concluded that not a drop of rain had ever fallen here. Mud would have meant more prosperity, but when it does rain these already ankle-deep roads at the bottoms of the great caÑons must surely be in close proximity to the infernal regions.

Any suggestion of this was spared us, however, as we were denied any hint of the great transformation that spring brings to the loess country, turning it from the delicate light brown that is as unbroken during the autumn and winter as the blue of the cloudless sky overhead to a vernal green which those who have seen it say is seldom surpassed in beautiful landscapes. Such loess cliffs as no words can describe became commonplace, almost unnoticed sights along the way, cliffs falling gradually from sky to abyss so far below as almost to seem bottomless. All the population for long distances burrowed in human rabbit-warrens dug in these cliffs, row above row of caves, like cities of ten- or twelve-story cliff-dwellings. Many of the caves proved at close sight to be ruined and abandoned; usually these were fallen in, with a great round hole in the roof. Of course the former inhabitants had dug a new home elsewhere—unless they were buried in the old one—and the population was not so dense as the myriad holes in the mountain-sides suggested. There was a great difference, too, in the grades of dwellings even among such unlikely homes as these. A cave could be as noisome a hut as any hovel out on a plain; sometimes a mere hole in the cliff looked like nothing in particular, until a closer glance showed it to be the entrance to a long passageway leading to several courts that were surrounded by a dozen or more arched cave-dwellings, perhaps all well below the level of the sunken road. Sometimes the proud family had even gone to the trouble of putting an elaborate inscription over the doorway, and had fitted it with wooden sills. But this was unusual, for with such slight exceptions literally everything was made of the quickly crumbling earth,—the “devil screen” across the way from the entrance (though this very important feature of Chinese architecture was rare in the west), the wall filling up the great arch of the cave, with a small door cut in it, even the k’ang, or stone-hard family bed, inside.

Thus everything, walls, houses, cliffs, terraced hillsides, even the dreary cave-dwellers themselves, had the selfsame monotonous color, and in all the autumn landscape there was nothing to break it, to give it the faintest contrast. A sad place surely was this for man to live, like an aged world that was wearing out and would soon be fit only to be discarded. Indeed, the process of dissolution was going on under our very eyes. There were often places where the road had very recently dropped away into a mammoth caÑon so deep that to peer over the brink was to catch the breath in what might easily have been a spasm of dizziness; yet heavily laden carts still shrieked and lashed their way along the sheer edge of it, and all the miscellaneous traffic passing the spot where the next crumbling might carry it to perdition gave it no more attention than Chinese give to the open, unprotected, curbless wells that abound all over China like gopher-holes in our western prairies.

A world wearing away, and apparently there is no cure for it. The trees which might have held it together with their roots, to say nothing of the rain they would bring, were completely grubbed out centuries ago by those very ancestors whom the wretched modern inhabitants so highly honor. Those short-sighted forebears were all for the past, or at best for what was to them the present; and their living descendants have no choice but to follow the same short-sighted course, for the present is an unremitting struggle for mere existence now, and the future surely holds out little promise. To repair the fatal tree-wastefulness of their revered ancestors would require something like forcing every man in China to plant a tree a week, promptly lopping off the head of any one who cuts one down, and keeping this up as long as their ancestors took to grub out the forests that once graced the land; that is, for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

We think we know something of poverty and physical suffering in America, but in crowded, despoiled China we realize our ignorance. Here are perhaps the lowest forms of human beings, creatures in the image of man who are not merely akin to beasts but a kind of living offal. Nor are the dregs of the population to be found in this more roomy western part of the country; there the poorest might be called a middle class, though they are so poor that they burrow in caves and are out long before dawn and late into the night with basket and wicker shovel wandering the roads ready to fight for the droppings of passing animals. Perhaps there are some of them who take life by the forelock and force it more or less to do their bidding. But though here and there were what we would call “tough-looking characters,” even they seemed to be harmless, at least where foreigners were concerned. We hear much in these days of the anarchy of China, and in so far as a responsible, effective government goes the word is not ill chosen. Yet there is a cohesion, a momentum in Chinese society, in the great masses that populate the land, which makes a failure of formal government mainly a surface manifestation, with often scarcely a ripple disturbing the even flow of life in general, as it has gone on for centuries and perhaps will for centuries to come. In all west Shensi we saw hardly a soldier, and almost as little of any other coercive force; yet though there may not have been any bandits left in the province, as its Tuchun boldly asserted, nothing would have been easier than for any group of these thousands upon thousands of sturdy coolies for ever plodding to and fro, or the village crowds which gathered in the inn-yards to watch us eat modest noonday lunches which must have seemed to them princely, to fall upon a few stray foreigners lost in the great sea of Chinese humanity and despoil them of what in this land of utter poverty was their great riches. Not only was there no suggestion of such a thought, not only did they show us all the respect which the most haughty participant in extraterritoriality could demand; they were frankly friendly, neither out of fear nor hope of favor. Given the slightest provocation and they invariably smiled; the men, that is; the cripple-footed women never, and small wonder. Behind us lay a constant trail of childlike comment on our appearance, and especially on the stirrups of our army saddles. The Chinese are so minutely conservative that even to wrap a patch of leather about something which they have always hitherto seen without it is to arouse amazement. Often this amazement expressed itself in a burst of laughter, but never once was there anything about its unforced heartiness which could have been taken for ridicule. Possibly they did find covert ways to make fun at our expense; they nearly always called us moo-sha, for instance, which means missionary. But there was every reason to believe that this startling error was due to pure honest ignorance, perhaps once in a while to a desire to be complimentary; never, I feel sure, was there a deliberate attempt even to be unkindly.

The major likened the rank and file, the coolies at least, to our Southern negroes, with whom his army experience had given him a considerable acquaintance. There is a certain similarity of temperament; one might, indeed, follow up the thought and find a resemblance between the more morose, yet still Chinese, non-laboring classes and the mulatto or lighter types of negro, who so often have an air of brooding over their intermediate state of heredity. But one could easily carry the thought too far. There is much the same easy-going view of life—laughter easily provoked, often in the face of things which seem rather to call for tears; but beyond that the two races part company. The negro still loves his African leisure; if there is any one on earth without a trace of laziness in his make-up, surely it is the Chinese workman—though this be due merely to centuries of bitter competition for existence. Nor do the poorest of our cabin-dwelling blacks suffer anything like the poverty of the toilsome masses of China; even those of Haiti do not approach it. There are worse places in China, but even in this comparatively thinly populated northwest thousands of people quite willing to toil from sun to sun at anything promising them the slightest remuneration live under conditions in which it would literally be illegal to keep pigs in any well governed section of the Occident. You can always get men to do anything do-able, on short notice, in China; there is such an enormous surplus of them. If there is a little stream across the trail, there are sure to be men waiting to set those who are shod across it for a brass “cash” or two; if there is a load too cumbersome or too heavy for a donkey or a pack-mule, you can easily pick up men to carry it. Most of us have the comforting impression that, being inured to them for countless generations, they do not feel their hardships and sufferings as we should. No doubt they do not, for if they did it would be beyond human power to produce that cheerful atmosphere, as wholly devoid of surliness as of melancholy, with which they seem to surround their bitter lives.

It was one of the surprises of our journey that feathered game was more than abundant where every other thing, down to the last grass-blade and the tiniest bit of offal, is laboriously gathered and fully utilized, where hunger drives into the pot everything that can possibly be made quasi-edible. Wild ducks and geese all but obscured the sun along every important river-valley; partridge, quail, and beautiful pheasants covering many a bushy slope, often even the planted fields themselves, as thickly as sparrows a barn-yard, were to be had almost for the shooting. Cliff-sides blue with pigeons, the air filled with drapery-like swirls of them, ceased in time even to draw the attention. Were the major less sensitive to the difference between this and big game stalking, I might mention that single shot which brought down eight of these silky-blue birds; though that, to be sure, was before the attempt to coerce a recalcitrant mule with the butt of a not too young and sturdy—not to say borrowed—shot-gun resulted so disastrously. There seldom was a time during all our long journey out through the west that a little exertion could not add wild fowl to our canned larder; yet, as far as we were ever able to discover, the hungry people of that region made no attempt to kill or capture them—nor to destroy the swarms of magpies, crows, sparrows, and rooks which it was hard to believe left anything of the crops for the men and beasts who toiled to raise them. The laws had nothing to say on the subject; we saw it proved that there is no prejudice against such food when it can be had, and granted that guns are rare and ammunition too expensive for a Chinese peasant, certainly the race has given proof enough of ingenuity and of accomplishing under difficulties to warrant astonishment at the apparent indifference to what in many regions is the most valuable product still ungathered.

Every few hours we came upon a walled city. I never broke myself of the feeling that romance and the picturesqueness of the Middle Ages were sure to be found within them, a welcome relief from the sordid, filthy monotony outside. Yet invariably, when we had made our way through the long dusty suburb, crowded with outdoor eating-places and miserable shops full of everything to a coolie’s taste, with the din of the eager shouting of wares in our ears, and had passed through the big frowning gate towering above the massive old crenelated wall, we found the same filthy, uneven earth streets lined by the same miserable shops, in fact, shops often poorer and less energetic, conservative old establishments which had grown effete, while the comparative new-comers outside the walls still had the activity of youth. Black swine wandering at will, pariah dogs covered with great open sores, human beings in little better condition, were as common to the enclosed town as to the suburbs. Often the city itself seemed half deserted, with as many ruins and open spaces as occupied mud-dwellings, though its extramural outskirts might be densely crowded. Many towns were so poor and uninviting that our cartmen drove around them—always on the south side, we noticed, close beside the walls—and stopped at inns outside. There was at least one advantage in this, and perhaps one disadvantage. Though the city gates are in theory opened “when the chicken first sing,” as Chang put it, they might still be closed as late as six, and thus hold up our departure until we could rout out several sleepy soldiers with candle-lanterns, present visiting-cards to prove our rights to extra attention, and perhaps not be on our way again until the eastern horizon began to pale. On the other hand, there was, of course, whatever danger existed that bandits coming upon us in the night would have us at their mercy outside the walls. Yet I confess to having ridden through those outwardly mysterious old walled towns whenever it was reasonably possible, and to going for a stroll within them when we lodged outside, always in quest of that romantic something that seemed sure to be found there, yet never was.

In the Mohammedan section of Sian-fu there are men who, but for their Chinese garb and habits, might pass for Turks in Damascus or Constantinople