ul, being obliged to return to the
Lamasery, where he had duties to fulfil towards his masters and
superiors. He added, that on the third day of the new moon, when he had
satisfied all his obligations, he would come back and resume his
services. He spoke in a tone of intense kindliness, in order to make us
forget the daily impertinences he had been guilty of towards us. We did
not at all urge him to return. Though delighted at the prospect of
renewing our studies with him, we were determined not to seem anxious
about the matter, lest we should raise still higher the already
preposterous estimate he had of his own importance. We told him that
since propriety recalled him to the Lamasery for the first day of the
year, he ought by all means to obey the call. We then offered him three
rolls of sapeks, saying, according to the custom in such cases, that it
was to enable him to drink with his friends a cup of high-coloured tea.
For some minutes he feigned that he would not accept the coin, but at
last we overcame his exquisite delicacy, and he consented to put the
sapeks in his pocket. We then lent him Samdadchiemba's mule, and he left
us.

The last days of the year are ordinarily, with the Chinese, days of anger
and of mutual annoyance; for having at this period made up their
accounts, they are vehemently engaged in getting them in; and every
Chinese being at once creditor and debtor, every Chinese is just now
hunting his debtors and hunted by his creditors. He [Picture:
Pawnbroker's Shop] who returns from his neighbour's house, which he has
been throwing into utter confusion by his clamorous demands for what that
neighbour owes him, finds his own house turned inside out by an
uproarious creditor, and so the thing goes round. The whole town is a
scene of vociferation, disputation, and fighting. On the last day of the
year disorder attains its height; people rush in all directions with
anything they can scratch together, to raise money upon, at the broker's
or pawnbroker's, the shops of which tradespeople are absolutely besieged
throughout the day with profferers of clothes, bedding, furniture,
cooking utensils, and moveables of every description. Those who have
already cleared their houses in this way, and yet have not satisfied the
demands upon them, post off to their relations and friends to borrow
something or other which they vow shall be returned immediately, but
which immediately takes its way to the Tang-Po