tized,
denationalized, a luckless victim of fate and morbid fancy.

It was malaria and her workings, from which there was no escape.

Malaria is supposed by the natives of the tropic belt to be sent to
Europeans by Providence as a chastening for the otherwise insupportable
energy of the white man. Malignant malaria is one of Nature's
watch-dogs, set to guard her shrine of peace and ease and to punish
woeful intruders. And she had brought me to China to punish me. As is
her wont, Nature milked the manhood out of me, racked me with aches and
pains, shattered me with chills, scorched me with fever fires, pursued
me with despairing visions, and hag-rode me without mercy. Accursed
newspapers, with their accursed routine, came back to me; all the
stories and legends that I had ever heard, all the facts that I had ever
learnt, came to me in a fashion wonderfully contorted and distorted;
sensations welded together in ghastly, brain-stretching conglomerates,
instinct with individuality and personality, human but torturingly
inhuman, crowded in upon me. The barriers dividing the world of ideas,
sensations, and realities seemed to have been thrown down, and all
rushed into my brain like a set of hungry foxhounds. The horror of
effort and the futility of endeavor permeated my very soul. My weary,
helpless brain was filled with hordes of unruly imaginings; I was
masterless, panic-driven, maddened, and had to abide for weeks--yea,
months--with a fever-haunted soul occupying a fever-rent and weakened
body.

At Yuen-nan-fu, whither I arrived in due course after considerable
struggling, dysentery laid me up again, and threatened to pull me nearer
to the last great brink. For weeks, as the guest of my friend, Mr. C.A.
Fleischmann, I stayed here recuperating, and subsequently, on the advice
of my medical attendant, Dr. A. Feray, I went back to Tong-ch'uan-fu,
among the mountains, and spent several happy months with Mr. and Mrs.
Evans.

Had it not been for their brotherly and sisterly zeal in nursing me,
which never flagged throughout my illness, future travelers might have
been able to point to a little grave-mound on the hill-tops, and have
given a chance thought to an adventurer whom the fates had handled
roughly. But there was more in this than I could see; my destiny was
then slowly shaping.

Throughout the rains, and well on into the winter, I stayed with Mr. and
Mrs. Evans, and then continued my walking tour, as is hereafter