t entirely
dependent upon cotton for clothing, which in winter is padded with a
cheap wadding to an abnormal thickness. The common people wear no
underclothing whatever. When they sleep they strip to the skin, and wrap
themselves in a single wadded blanket, sleeping the sleep of the tired
people their excessive labor makes them. And, although their clothes
might be the height of discomfort, they show their famous indifference
to comfort by never complaining. These burdensome clothes hang around
them like so many bags, with the wide gaps here and there where the wind
whistles to the flesh. It is a national characteristic that they are
immune to personal inconveniences, a philosophy which I found to be
universal, from the highest to the lowest.

Everybody we met, from the British Consul-General downward, was
surprised to know that my companion and I had no knowledge of the
Chinese language, and seemed to look lightly upon our chances of ever
getting through.

It was true. Neither my companion nor myself knew three words of the
language, but went forward simply believing in the good faith of the
Chinese people, with our passports alone to protect us. That we should
encounter difficulties innumerable, that we should be called upon to put
up with the greatest hardships of life, when viewed from the standard to
which one had been accustomed, and that we should be put to great
physical endurance, we could not doubt. But we believed in the Chinese,
and believed that should any evil befall us it would be the outcome of
our own lack of forbearance, or of our own direct seeking. We knew that
to the Chinese we should at once be "foreign devils" and "barbarians,"
that if not holding us actually in contempt, they would feel some
condescension in dealing and mixing with us; but I was personally of the
opinion that it was easier for us to walk through China than it would be
for two Chinese, dressed as Chinese, to walk through Great Britain or
America. What would the canny Highlander or the rural English rustic
think of two pig-tailed men tramping through his countryside?

We anchored at Ichang at 7:30 a.m. on March 19th. I fell up against a
boatman who offered to take us ashore. An uglier fellow I had never seen
in the East. The morning sunshine soon dried the decks of the gunboat
_Kinsha_ (then stationed in the river for the defense of the port) which
English jack-tars were swabbing in a half-hearted sort of way, and all
looked ros