accepted a reward of one halfpenny. He kept the foot steady while
shoeing it by lashing the fetlock to the pony's tail.

Caravans of cotton coming from Burma were meeting us all day. Miles away
the booming of their gongs sounded in the silent hills; a long time
afterwards their bells were heard jingling, and by-and-by the mules and
horses appeared under their huge bales of cotton, the foremost decorated
with scarlet tufts and plumes of pheasant tails, the last carrying the
saddle and bedding of the headman, as well as the burly headman himself,
perched above all. A man with a gong always headed the way; there was a
driver to every five animals. In the sandy bed of the river at one place
a caravan was resting. Their packs were piled in parallel rows; their
horses browsed on the hillside. I counted 107 horses in this one
caravan.

The prevailing pathological feature of the Chinese of Western Yunnan is
the deformity goitre. It may safely be asserted that it is as common in
many districts as are the marks of small-pox. Goitre occurs widely in
Annam, Siam, Upper Burma, the Shan States, and in Western China as far
as the frontier of Thibet. It is distinctly associated with cretinism
and its interrupted intellectual development. And the disease must
increase, for there is no attempt to check it. To be a "thickneck" is no
bar to marriage on either side. The goitrous intermarry, and have
children who are goitrous, or, rather, who will, if exposed to the same
conditions as their parents, inevitably develop goitre. Frequently the
disease is intensified in the offspring into cretinism, and I can
conceive of no sight more disgusting than that which so often met our
view, of a goitrous mother suckling her imbecile child. On one
afternoon, among those who passed us on the road, I counted eighty
persons with the deformity. On another day nine adults were climbing a
path, by which we had just descended, every one of whom had goitre. In
one small village, out of eighteen full-grown men and women whom I met
in the street down which I rode, fifteen were affected. My diary in the
West, especially from Yunnan City to Yungchang, after which point the
cases greatly diminished in number, became a monotonous record of cases.
At the mission in Tali three women are employed, and of these two are
goitrous; the third, a Minchia woman, is free from the disease, and I
have been told that among the indigenes the disease is much less common
than amon