inkled through the forest,
while the herd boy filled the air with the sweet tones of his bamboo
flute, breathing out his soul in music more beautiful than any bagpipes.
Cotton is the chief article of import entering China by this highway.
From Talifu to the frontier a traveller could trace his way by the
fluffs of cotton torn by the bushes from the mule-packs.

The road through the forest reaches the highest points, because it is at
the highest points that the Chinese forts are situated, either on the
road or on some elevated clearing near it.

The forts are stockades inclosed in wooden palisades, and guarded by
_chevaux de frise_ of sharp-cut bamboo. The barracks are a few native
straw-thatched wooden huts. Perhaps a score or two of men form the
garrison of each fort; they are badly armed, if armed at all. There are
no guns and no store supplies. Water is trained into the stockades down
open conduits of split bamboo. To anyone who has seen the Chinese
soldiers at home in Western China, it is diverting to observe the
credence which is given to Chinese statements of the armed strength of
Western China. How much longer are we to persist in regarding the
Chinese, as they now are, as a warlike power? In numbers, capacity for
physical endurance, calm courage when well officered, and powers
unequalled by any other race of mankind of doing the greatest amount of
labour on the smallest allowance of food, their potential strength is
stupendous. But they are not advancing, they are stationary; they look
backwards, not forwards; they live in the past. Weapons with which their
ancestors subdued the greater part of Asia they are loath to believe
are unfitted for conducting the warfare of to-day. Should Japan bring
China to terms, she can impose no terms that will not tend towards the
advancement of China. Victories such as Japan has won over China might
affect any other nation but China; but they are trifling and
insignificant in their effect upon the gigantic mass of China. Suppose
China has lost 20,000 men in this war, in one day there are 20,000
births in the Empire, and I am perfectly sure that, outside the
immediate neighbourhood of the seat of operations, the Chinese as a
nation, apart from the officials, are profoundly ignorant that there is
even a war, or, as they would term it, a rebellion, in progress.
Trouble, serious trouble, will begin in China in the near future, for
the time must be fast approaching when the effete a