before, we were witnesses of a domestic quarrel which
might well have become a tragedy. On the green outside their cabin a
husband with goitre, enraged against his goitrous wife, was kept from
killing her by two elderly goitrous women. All were speaking with
horrible goitrous voices as if they had cleft palates, and the husband
was hoarse with fury. Jealousy could not have been the cause of the
quarrel, for his wife was one of the most hideous creatures I have seen
in China. Throwing aside the bamboo with which he was threatening her,
the husband ran into the house, and was out again in a moment
brandishing a long native sword with which he menaced speedy death to
the joy of his existence. I stood in the road and watched the
disturbance, and with me the soldier-guard, who did not venture to
interfere. But the two women seized the angry brute and held him till
his wife toddled round the corner. Now, if this were a determined woman,
she could best revenge herself for the cruelty that had been done her by
going straightway and poisoning herself with opium, for then would her
spirit be liberated, ever after to haunt her husband, even if he escaped
punishment for being the cause of her death. If in the dispute he had
killed her, he would be punished with "strangulation after the usual
period," the sentence laid down by the law and often recorded in the
_Peking Gazette_ (_e.g._, May 15th, 1892), unless he could prove her
guilty of infidelity, or want of filial respect for his parents, in
which case his action would be praiseworthy rather than culpable. If,
however, in the dispute the wife had killed her husband, or by her
conduct had driven him to suicide, she would be inexorably tied to the
cross and put to death by the "_Ling chi_," or "degrading and slow
process." For a wife to kill her husband has always been regarded as a
more serious crime than for a husband to kill his wife; even in our own
highly favoured country, till within a few years of the present century,
the punishment for the man was death by hanging, but in the case of the
woman death by burning alive.

Let me at this point interpolate a word or two about the method of
execution known as the _Ling chi_. The words are commonly, and quite
wrongly, translated as "death by slicing into 10,000 pieces"--a truly
awful description of a punishment whose cruelty has been
extraordinarily misrepresented. It is true that no punishment is more
dreaded by the Chinese than