esteem. They received thirty-two tael cents per man per diem, and for
the stopping days on the road one hundred cash. None of them, of course,
could speak a word of English.

The ninety li to Che-chi was mostly along narrow paths by the sides of
river-beds, the intermediate plains having upturned acres waiting for
the spring. At Ta-chiao (7,500 feet), where I stayed for my first
alfresco meal at midday, the man--a tall, gaunt, ugly fellow, pockmarked
and vile of face--told us he was a traveler, and that he had been to
Shanghai. This I knew to be a barefaced lie. He voluntarily explained to
the visitors, gathered to see the barbarian feed, what condensed milk
was for, but he went wide of the mark when he announced that my pony,[Z]
hog-maned and dock-tailed (but Chinese still), was an American, as he
said I was. A young mother near by, suffering from acute eye
inflammation, was lying in a smellful gutter on a felt mat, two pigs on
one side and a naked boy of eight or so on the other, whilst she heaped
upon the head of the innocent babe she was suckling curses most horribly
blood-curdling. Dogs--the universal scavengers of the awakening
interior, to which merest allusion is barred by one's Western sense of
decency--just outside Che-chi, where I stayed the night, had recently
devoured the corpse of a little child. Its clothing was strewn in my
path, together with the piece of fibre matting in which it had been
wrapped, and the dogs were then fighting over the bones.

To Lai-t'eo-p'o was a day that men might call a "killer."

It is a dirty little place with a dirty little street, lying at the foot
of a mountain known throughout Western China as one of the wildest of
Nature's corners, nearly ten thousand feet high, a terrific climb under
best conditions. A clear half-moon, and stars of a silvery twinkle,
looked pityingly upon me as I started at 3 a.m., ignorant of the
dangerously narrow defile leading along cliffs high up from the Yili Ho.
In the dark, cautiously I groped along. Not without a painful emotion of
impending danger, as I watched the stellular reflections dancing in the
rushing river, did I wander on in the wake of a group of pack-ponies,
and took my turn in being assisted over the broken chasms by the
muleteers. Two fellows got down below and practically lifted the tiny
animals over the passes where they could not keep their footing.
Gradually I saw the nightlike shadows flee away, and with the dawn came
signs