on up to themselves,
when they have nothing else that their adversaries will accept. The
winter is severe at Pekin, and it sometimes happens that men who have
lost everything, down to their last garments, are thrust naked into
the open air, where they perish of cold. Sometimes a man will bet his
fingers on a game, and if he loses he must submit to have them chopped
off and turned over to the winner.

[Illustration: A LOTTERY PRIZE.]

There is a tradition that one of the Chinese emperors used to get up
lotteries, in which the ladies of the court were the prizes. He
obtained quite a revenue from the business, which was popular with
both the players and the prizes, as the latter were enabled to obtain
husbands without the trouble of negotiation.

The lottery has a place in the Chinese courts of justice. There is one
mode of capital punishment in which a dozen or twenty knives are
placed in a covered basket, and each knife is marked for a particular
part of the body. The executioner puts his hand under the cover and
draws at random. If the knife is for the toes, they are cut off one
after another; if for the feet, they are severed, and so on until a
knife for the heart or neck is reached. Usually the friends of the
victim bribe the executioner to draw early in the game a knife whose
wound will be fatal, and he generally does as he agrees. The
bystanders amuse themselves by betting as to how long the culprit will
stand it. Facetious dogs, those Chinese.

To enumerate all the ways of inflicting punishment in China would be
to fill a volume. Punishment is one of the fine arts, and a man who
can skin another elegantly is entitled to rank as an artist. The
bastinado and floggings are common, and then they have huge shears,
like those used in tin shops, for snipping off feet and arms, very
much as a gardener would cut off the stem of a rose.

Some years ago the environs of Tientsin were infested by bands of
robbers who were suspected of living in villages a few miles away. The
governor was ordered by the imperial authority to suppress these
robberies, and in order to get the right persons he sent out his
soldiers and arrested everybody, old and young, in the suspected
villages. Of course there were innocent persons among the captives,
but that made no difference; some of them were blind, and others
crippled, but the police had orders to bring in everybody. The
prisoners were summarily tried; some of them had their heads cu