body, so that everybody from
time to time draws everybody's blood. In the depth of winter, though the
winter here is desperately cold, people go about with their arms and half
their legs bare. To wear clothing adapted to the icy season would be
considered a mark of pusillanimity. A good brave fellow, they say,
should fear nothing, neither men nor elements. At Tang-Keou-Eul the
Chinese themselves have lost much of their urbanity and of the polished
forms of their language, having involuntarily undergone the influence of
the Houng-Mao-Eul, who converse together in much the same style that we
can imagine tigers in the woods to converse. On the day of our arrival
at Tang-Keou-Eul, a few minutes before we entered the town, we met a Long
Hair who had been giving his horse drink in the River Keou-Ho.
Samdadchiemba, who was always attracted by anything having an eccentric
air, cautiously approached the man, and saluted him in the Tartar
fashion, saying, "Brother, art thou at peace?" The Houng-Mao-Eul turned
fiercely towards him: "What business of thine is it, tortoise-egg," cried
he, with the voice of a Stentor, "whether I am at peace or at war? And
what right hast thou to address as thy brother a man who knows nothing
about thee?" Poor Samdadchiemba was taken all aback at this reception,
yet he could not help admiring, as something very fine, this haughty
insolence of the Long Hair.

Tang-Keou-Eul, in consequence of its dirt and its excessive population,
is a very unwholesome place to live in. There is an universal odour of
grease and butter about, that is enough to make you sick. In certain
quarters, more particularly where the especial poor and the especial
vagabonds congregate, the stench is insupportable. Those who have no
house wherein to shelter themselves, collect in the nooks of streets and
squares, and there they lie, higgledy-piggledy, and half naked, upon
filthy straw, or rather, dung-heaps. There are stretched together the
sick young, and the infirm old, the dying man, sometimes the dead, whom
no one takes the trouble to bury, until, at length, putrefaction
manifesting itself, the bodies are dragged into the middle of the street,
whence the authorities remove them, and have them thrown into some
general pit. From amid this hideous misery there pullulates into the
bosom of the population, a crowd of petty thieves and swindlers, who, in
their address and audacity, leave far behind the Robert Macaires of t