all men, including Chinese
Plenipotentiaries, and colleagues European and American, on my way up
the Yangtze Kiang. We are penetrating into unknown regions, but I
trust shortly to be able to report to you my return, and all the
novelties I shall have seen.

[Sidenote: Afloat on the Yangtze Kiang.]

This morning at ten, I went to a temple which lies exactly between the
foreign settlement and the Chinese town of Shanghae, to meet there the
Imperial Commissioners, and to sign the tariff. We took with us the
photographs which Jocelyn had done for them, and which we had framed.
They were greatly delighted, and altogether my poor friends seemed in
better spirits than I had before seen them in. We passed from
photography to the electric telegraph, and I represented to them the
great advantage which the Emperor would derive from it in so extensive
an empire as China; how it would make him present in all the
provinces, &c. They seemed to enter into the subject. The conference
lasted rather more than an hour. After it, I returned to the
consulate, taking a tender adieu of Gros By the way. I embarked at 1,
and got under weigh at 2 P.M.... The tide was very strong against us,
so we have not made much way, but we are really in the Yangtze river.
We have moored between two flats with trees upon them; the mainland on
the left, and an island (Bush Island), recently formed from the mud of
the river, on the right. Though the earth has been uninteresting, it
has not been so with the sky, for the dark shades of night, which have
been gathering and thickening on the right have been confronted on
the left by the brightest imaginable star, and the thinnest possible
crescent moon, both resting on a couch of deep and gradually deepening
crimson. I have been pacing the bridge between the paddle-boxes,
contemplating this scene, until we dropped our anchor, and I came down
to tell you of this my first experience of the Yangtze. And what will
the sum of those experiences be? We are going into an unknown region,
along a river which, beyond Nankin, has not been navigated by
Europeans. We are to make our way through the lines of those strange
beings the Chinese Rebels. We are to penetrate beyond them to cities,
of the magnitude and population of which fabulous stories are told;
among people who have never seen Western