iles of jungle, forest and
mountain land in Annam and Tongking, comes to an end at Hanoi, the
capital of Indo-China. The entire length of the Route Mandarine may now
be traversed by auto-bus--an excellent way to see the country provided
you are inured to fatigue, do not mind the heat, and are not
over-particular as to your fellow passengers. A motor car is, of
course, more comfortable and more expensive; a small one can be rented
for ninety dollars a day.

Nowhere has the colonizing white man encountered greater obstacles
than those which have confronted the French road-builders in
Indo-China; nowhere has Nature turned toward him a sterner and more
forbidding face. But, though their coolies have died by the thousands
from cholera and fever, though their laboriously constructed bridges
have been swept away in a night by rivers swollen from the torrential
rains, though the fast-growing jungle persistently encroaches on the
hard-won right-of-way, though they have had to combat savage beasts and
still more savage men, they have prosecuted with indomitable courage
and tenacity the task of building a road "to Tomorrow from the Land of
Yesterday."

Saigon, the capital of Cochin-China and the most important place in
France's Asiatic possessions, is a European city set down on the edge
of Asia. So far as its appearance goes, it might be on the Seine
instead of the Saigon. The original town was burned by the French
during the fighting by which they obtained possession of the place and
they rebuilt it on European lines, with boulevards, shops, cafes, a
Hotel de Ville, a Theatre Municipal, a Musee, a Jardin Botanique, all
complete. The general plan of the city, with its regular streets and
intersecting boulevards, has evidently been modeled on that of the
French capital and the Saigonnese proudly speak of it as "the Paris of
the East." In certain respects this is taking a considerable liberty
with the truth, but they are very lonely and homesick and one does not
blame them. Most of the streets, which are paved after a fashion, are
lined with tamarinds, thus providing the shade so imperatively
necessary where the mercury hovers between 90 and 110, winter and
summer, day and night. At almost every street intersection stands a
statue of some one who bore a hand in the conquest of the country, from
the cassocked figure of Pigneau de Behaine, Bishop of Adran, the first
French missionary to Indo-China, to the effigy of the dashing Admi