mbers of these willing but
ill-treated animals were seen grazing in the hollows, by the wayside,
their backs in almost every instance cruelly lacerated by the continuous
rubbing of the wooden frames on which their loads were strapped. For
cruelty to animals China stands an easy first; love of animals does not
enter into their sympathies at all. I found this not to be the case
among the Miao and the I-pien, however; and the tribes across the
Yangtze below Chao-t'ong, locally called the Pa-pu, are, as a matter of
fact, fond of horses, and some of them capable horsemen.

The journey across these mountains has no perils. One may step aside a
few feet with no fear of falling a few thousand, a danger so common in
most of the country from Sui-fu downwards. The scenery is
magnificent--range after range of mountains in whatever direction you
look, nothing but mountains of varying altitudes. And the patches of
wooded slopes, alternating with the red earth and more fertile green
plots through which streams flow, with rolling waterfalls, picturesque
nooks and winding pathways, make pictures to which only the gifted
artist's brush could do justice. Often, gazing over the sunlit
landscape, in this land "South of the Clouds," one is held spellbound by
the intense beauty of this little-known province, and one wonders what
all this grand scenery, untouched and unmarred by the hand of man, would
become were it in the center of a continent covered by the ubiquitous
globe-trotter.

No country in the world more than West China possesses mountains of
combined majesty and grace. Rocks, everywhere arranged in masses of a
rude and gigantic character, have a ruggedness tempered by a singular
airiness of form and softness of environment, in a climate favorable in
some parts to the densest vegetation, and in others wild and barren. One
is always in sight of mountains rising to fourteen thousand feet or
more, and constantly scaling difficult pathways seven or eight or nine
thousand feet above the sea. And in the loneliness of a country where
nothing has altered very much the handiwork of God, an awe-inspiring
silence pervades everything. Bold, grey cliffs shoot up here through a
mass of verdure and of foliage, and there white cottages, perched in
seemingly inaccessible positions, glisten in the sun on the colored
mountain-sides. You saunter through stony hollows, along straight
passes, traversed by torrents, overhung by high walls of rocks, now
w