uthor from destruction_. _The one hundred li to
Kongshan_. _Wild, rugged moorland and mournful mountains_. _Wretchedness
of the people_. _Night travel in Western China_. _Author knocks a man
down_. _Late arrival and its vexations_. _Horrible inn accommodation_.
_End of the Yuen-nan Plateau_. _Appreciable rise in temperature_.
_Entertaining a band of inelegant infidels_. _European contention for
superiority, and the Chinese point of view_. _Insoluble conundrums of
"John's" national character_. _The Yuen-nan railway_. _Current ideas in
Yuen-nan regarding foreigners_. _Discourteous fu-song and his escapades_.
_Fright of ill-clad urchin_. _Scene at Yang-lin_. _Arrival at the
capital_.

No exaggeration is it to say that the eyes of the world are upon China.
It is equally safe to say that, whilst all is open and may be seen, but
little is understood.

In the Far Eastern and European press so much is heard of the awakening
of China that one is apt really to believe that the whole Empire, from
its Dan to Beersheba, is boiling for reform. But it may be that the husk
is taken from the kernel. The husk comprises the treaty ports and some
of the capital cities of the provinces; the kernel is that vast sleepy
interior of China. Few people, even in Shanghai, know what it means; so
that to the stay-at-home European pardon for ignorance of existing
conditions so much out of his focus should readily be granted.

From Shanghai, up past Hankow, on to Ichang, through the Gorges to
Chung-king, is a trip likely to strike optimism in the breast of the
most skeptical foreigner. But after he has lived for a couple of years
in an interior city as I have done, with its antiquated legislation, its
superstition and idolatry, its infanticide, its girl suicides, its
public corruption and moral degradation, rubbing shoulders continually
at close quarters with the inhabitants, and himself living in the main a
Chinese life, our optimist may alter his opinions, and stand in wonder
at the extraordinary differences in the most ordinary details of life at
the ports on the China coast and the Interior, and of the gross
inconsistencies in the Chinese mind and character. If in addition he has
stayed a few days away from a city in which the foreigners were shut up
inside the city walls because the roaring mob of rebels outside were
asking for their heads, and he has had to abandon part of his overland
trip because of the fear that his own head might have be