blance to
Moltke. He had smoked opium, he told Mr. Smith, the missionary, for
fifty years, but always in moderation. His daily allowance was two
_chien_ of raw opium, rather more than one-fifth of an ounce, but he
knew many Chinese, he told the missionary, who smoked daily five times
as much opium as he did without apparent injury.

In Tali there are four chief officials: the Prefect or Fu Magistrate,
the Hsien or City Magistrate, the Intendant or Taotai, and the Titai.
The yamen of the Taotai is a humble residence for so important an
official; but the yamen of the Titai, between the South Gate and the
Five Glory Tower, is one of the finest in the province. The Titai is not
only the chief military commander of the province of Yunnan, but he is a
very much married man. An Imperialist, he has yet obeyed the Mohammedan
injunction and taken to himself four wives in order to be sure of
obtaining one good one. He has been abundantly blessed with children. In
offices at the back of the Titai's yamen and within its walls, is the
local branch of the Imperial Chinese telegraphs, conducted by two
Chinese operators, who can read and write English a little, and can
speak crudely a few sentences.

The City Magistrate is an advanced opium-smoker, a slave to the pipe,
who neglects his duties. In his yamen I saw the wooden cage in which
prisoners convicted of certain serious crimes are slowly done to death
by starvation and exhaustion, as well as the wooden cages of different
shape in which criminals of another class condemned to death are carried
to and from the capital.

The City prison is in the Hsien's yamen, but permission to enter was
refused me, though the missionary has frequently been admitted. "The
prison," explained the Chinese clerk, "is private, and strangers cannot
be admitted." I was sorry not to be allowed to see the prison, all the
more because I had heard from the missionary nothing but praise of the
humanity and justice of its management.

The gaols of China, or, as the Chinese term them, the "hells," just as
the prison hulks in England forty years ago were known as "floating
hells," have been universally condemned for the cruelties and
deprivations practised in them. They are probably as bad as were the
prisons of England in the early years of the present century.

The gaolers purchase their appointments, as they did in England in the
time of John Howard, and, as was the case in England, they receive no
other p