e much
more shy than their rugged sisters of the steppes. Tenacious of their
word, these people were also scrupulous about returning favors. Our
exhibitions were usually rewarded by a spread of sweets and yellow Dungan
tea. Of this we would partake beneath the shade of their well-trained
grape-arbors, while listening to the music, or rather discord, of a
peculiar stringed instrument played by the boys. Its bow of two parts was
so interlaced with the strings of the instrument as to play upon two at
every draw. Another musician usually accompanied by beating little sticks
on a saucer.

These are the people who were introduced by the Manchus to replace the
Kalmucks in the Kuldja district, and who in 1869 so terribly avenged upon
their masters the blood they previously caused to flow. The fertile
province of Kuldja, with a population of 2,500,000, was reduced by their
massacres to one vast necropolis. On all sides are canals that have become
swamps, abandoned fields, wasted forests, and towns and villages in ruins,
in some of which the ground is still strewn with the bleached bones of the
murdered.

As we ascended the Ili valley piles of stones marked in succession the
sites of the towns of Turgen, Jarkend, Akkend, and Khorgos, names which
the Russians are already reviving in their pioneer settlements. The
largest of these, Jarkend, is the coming frontier town, to take the place
of evacuated Kuldja. About twenty-two miles east of this point the large
white Russian fort of Khorgos stands bristling on the bank of the river of
that name, which, by the treaty of 1881, is now the boundary-line of the
Celestial empire. On a ledge of rocks overlooking the ford a Russian
sentinel was walking his beat in the solitude of a dreary outpost. He
stopped to watch us as we plunged into the flood, with our Russian telega
for a ferry-boat. "All's well," we heard him cry, as, bumping over the
rocky bottom, we passed from Russia into China. "Ah, yes," we thought;
" 'All's well that ends well,' but this is only the beginning."

[Illustration: THE CUSTOM-HOUSE AT KULDJA.]

A few minutes later we dashed through the arched driveway of the Chinese
custom-house, and were several yards away before the lounging officials
realized what it was that flitted across their vision. "Stop! Come back!"
they shouted in broken Russian. Amid a confusion of chattering voices,
rustling gowns, clattering shoes, swinging pigtails, and clouds of opium
and tobacc