of which our traveler gives a most interesting account. The
road to Zi-Ka-Wai lay over a sandy plain intersected with canals.
On both sides of the road were hundreds of coffins resting upon the
surface of the ground. In the northern part of China there are no
grave-yards, and the coffins were arranged sometimes in piles in the
fields. It is said that they thus remain until a change takes place
in the reigning dynasty, when they are all destroyed. As the present
dynasty has reigned about three hundred years, the accumulation may be
imagined. This traditional respect for the inviolability of the dead
is one of the chief obstacles in the way of the introduction of the
telegraph and railroad in China. A commercial house in Shanghai had
built a telegraph to Wo-Soung to announce the arrival of the mail, but
in a few days the wire was cut in more than five hundred places--at
all the points where its shadow from the rising sun fell upon the
coffins lying on the ground.

At Zi-Ka-Wai the Jesuits have an educational institution, and, dressed
in the Chinese costume, smoking the long native pipes, received their
visitors with great cordiality. Their pupils are divided into three
classes. The first consists of the children of the neighboring towns
who have been deserted by their parents and left to die of hunger.
The majority of them are lepers, and have been more or less perfectly
cured by the Fathers. When brought to the institution they are
thoroughly cleaned, being rubbed with pumice stone. They receive an
industrial as well as a literary education. In one building they
are taught to read and write, and in another are the schools for
shoemaking, carpentering, printing and other manual arts; so that,
being received at the age of five or six, at twenty to twenty-one they
are launched upon the world with an education and a trade.

There are about four hundred children in this class, and the activity,
the order and organization of the workshops, and the exquisite
cleanliness of the surroundings, are delightful to see. Near at hand
is a school of a higher grade, to which the most promising pupils
are transferred for the study of Chinese literature. The system of
teaching here is peculiar: all the pupils are required to study aloud,
and the din is in consequence deafening and incessant. Then there is
the highest class, consisting of about two hundred and fifty youths,
the sons of rich mandarins, who pay heavily for their instruction.