made the old man
so sick that he said he would never take opium again, and, if he did, he
would not send for the foreign gentleman.

The other was that of a young bride, a girl of unusual personal
attraction, only ten days married, who thus early had become weary of
the pock-marked husband her parents had sold her to. She was dressed
still in her bridal attire, which had not been removed since marriage;
she was dressed in red--the colour of happiness. "She was dressed in her
best, all ready for the journey," and was determined to die, because
dead she could repay fourfold the injuries which she had received while
living. In this case many neighbours were present, and, as all were
anxious to prevent the liberation of the girl's evil spirit, I proved to
them how skilful are the barbarian doctors. The bride was induced to
drink hot water till it was, she declared, on a level with her neck,
then I gave her a hypodermic injection of that wonderful emetic
apomorphia. The effect was very gratifying to all but the patient.

Small-pox, or, as the Chinese respectfully term it, "Heavenly Flowers,"
is a terrible scourge in Western China. It is estimated that two
thousand deaths--there is a charming vagueness about all Chinese
figures--from this disease alone occur in the course of a year in the
valley of Tali. Inoculation is practised, as it has been for many
centuries, by the primitive method of introducing a dried pock-scab, on
a lucky day, into one of the nostrils. The people have heard of the
results of Western methods of inoculation, and immense benefit could be
conferred upon a very large community by sending to the Inland Mission
in Talifu a few hundred tubes of vaccine lymph. Vaccination introduced
into Western China would be a means, the most effective that could be
imagined, to check the death rate over that large area of country which
was ravaged by the civil war, and whose reduced population is only a
small percentage of the population which so fertile a country needs for
its development. Infanticide is hardly known in that section of Yunnan
of which Tali may be considered the capital. Small-pox kills the
children. There is no need for a mother to sacrifice her superfluous
children, for she has none.

Another disease endemic in Yunnan is the bubonic plague, which is, no
doubt, identical with the plague that has lately played havoc in Hong
Kong and Canton. Cantonese peddlers returning to the coast probably
carried the