no supper, and from
that day lost his appetite and was afflicted with melancholy. For some
time his anxious and puzzled parent could get no satisfactory answer to
his inquiries; but at length the poor young man burst out, almost crying
from an inexplicable pain: 'Oh, father, that tallest devil! that tallest
devil, father!'"

Girls for Yunnan City are bought at two chief centres--at Chaotong, as
we have seen, and at Bichih. They are carried to the city in baskets.
They are rarely sold into prostitution, but are bought as slave girls
for domestic service, as concubines, and occasionally as wives. Their
great merit is the absence of the "thickneck," goitre.

The morning after my visit, Li sent me his card, together with a leg of
mutton and a pile of sweet cakes. I returned my card, and gave the
bearer 200 cash (fivepence), not as a return gift to the mandarin, but
as a private act of generosity to his servant--all this being in
accordance with Chinese etiquette.

My host in Yunnan, and the actual manager and superintendent of the
telegraphs of the two provinces, is a clever Danish gentleman, Mr.
Christian Jensen, an accomplished linguist, to whom every European
resident and traveller in the province is indebted for a thousand acts
of kindness and attention. He has a rare knowledge of travel in China.
Mr. Jensen arrived in China in 1880 in the service of the Great Northern
Telegraph Company--a Danish company. From December, 1881, when the first
Chinese telegraph line was opened (that from Shanghai to Tientsin), till
the spring of 1883, he was one of eight operatives and engineers lent by
the Company to the Chinese Government. In December 1883, having returned
in the meantime to the Great Northern he accepted an engagement under
the Imperial Government and he has been in their employ ever since.
During this time he has superintended the construction of 7000 li (2350
miles) of telegraph lines, and it was he who, on the 20th May, 1890,
effected the junction of the Chinese system with the French lines at
Laokai. Among the more important lines constructed by him are those
joining the two capital cities of the provinces of Yunnan and Kweichow;
that from Yunnan City to Mungtze, on the frontier of Tonquin; that from
Canton to the boundary of Fuhkien province; and that from Yunnan City
through Tali to Tengyueh (Momien), this last line being the one which
will eventually unite with the marvellous Indian telegraph system at the
Bur