ichtwo. In one point he went beyond his
agreement, viz., in giving me free of charge a furnished house
of two stories, with ten rooms and a garden. It was on the bank
of the "Great River" with the picturesque hills of Hanyang nearly
opposite, a site which I preferred to any other in the city. I there
enjoyed the purest air with a minimum of inconvenience from narrow,
dirty streets. To these exceptional advantages it is doubtless due
that my health held out, notwithstanding the heat of the climate,
which, the locality being far inland and in lat. 30 deg. 30', was that
of a fiery furnace. On the night of the autumnal equinox, my first
in Wuchang, the mercury stood in my bedroom at 102 deg.. I was the
guest of the Rev. Arnold Foster of the London Missionary
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Society, whose hospitality was warm in more ways than one.

The viceroy returned from Peking, broken in health; the little
strength he had left was given to military preparation for the
contingencies of the Russo-Japanese War; and his university was
consigned to the limbo of forgotten dreams.

Viceroy Chang has been derided, not quite justly, as possessing a
superabundance of initiative along with a rather scant measure of
finality, taking up and throwing down his new schemes as a child
does its playthings. In these enterprises the paucity of results
was due to the shortcomings of the agents to whom he entrusted
their management. The same reproach and the same apology might be
made for the Empress Dowager who, like the Roman Sybil, committed
her progressive decrees to the mercy of the winds without seeming
to care what became of them.

Next after the education of his people the development of their
material resources has been with Chang a leading object. To this
end he has opened cotton-mills, silk-filatures, glass-works and
iron-works, all on an extensive scale, with foreign machinery and
foreign experts. For miles outside of the gates of Wuchang the
banks of the river are lined with these vast establishments. Do
they not announce more clearly than the batteries which command
the waterway the coming of a new China? Some of them he has kept
going at an annual loss. The cotton-mill, for example, was standing
idle when I arrived, because in the hands of his mandarins he could
not make it pay expenses. A Canton merchant leased it on easy terms,
and made it
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such a conspicuous success that he is now growing rich. It is an
axiom in China that no m