welve to twenty miles a day. In the presence of
their patience and endurance, we were ashamed to think of such a thing as
hardship.

[Illustration: IN THE GOBI DESERT.]

The station-houses on the desert were nothing more than a collection of
mud huts near a surface well of strongly brackish water. Here, most of the
caravans would put up during the day, and travel at night. There was no
such thing as a restaurant; each one by turn must do his own cooking in
the inn kitchen, open to all. We, of course, were expected to carry our
own provisions and do our own culinary work like any other respectable
travelers. This we had frequently done before where restaurants were not
to be found. Many a time we would enter an inn with our arms filled with
provisions, purchased at the neighboring bazaars, take possession of the
oven and cooking utensils, and proceed to get up an American meal, while
all the time a hundred eyes or more would be staring at us in blank
amazement. But here on the desert we could buy nothing but very coarse
flour. When asked if they had an egg or a piece of vegetable, they would
shout "_Ma-you_" ("There is none") in a tone of rebuke, as much as to say:
"My conscience! man, what do you expect on the Gobi?" We would have to be
content with our own tea made in the iron pot, fitting in the top of the
mud oven, and a kind of sweetened bread made up with our supply of sugar
brought from Hami. This we nicknamed our "Gobi cake," although it did
taste rather strongly of brackish water and the garlic of previous
contents of the one common cooking-pot. We would usually take a large
supply for road use on the following day, or, as sometimes proved, for the
midnight meal of the half-starved inn-dog. The interim between the evening
meal and bedtime was always employed in writing notes by the feeble,
flickering light of a primitive taper-lamp, which was the best we had
throughout the Chinese journey.

[Illustration: STATION OF SEB-BOO-TCHAN.]

A description of traveling in China would by no means be complete without
some mention of the vermin which infest, not only inns and houses, but the
persons of nearly all the lower classes. Lice and fleas seem to be the
_sine qua non_ of Chinese life, and in fact the itching with some seems to
furnish the only occasion for exercise. We have seen even shopkeepers
before their doors on a sunny afternoon, amusing themselves by picking
these insidious creatures from their inner ga