ent, fed by a hundred
mountain streams, which washed our path and in horrible disfigurement
tore open the surface of the hill-sides.

The long day was drawing wearily to a close. As the sun was sinking
beyond the uneven hills over which I was to climb before the descent to
the town begins, the effect of the green and gold and red and brown
produced a striking picture of sweet poetic beauty. I stood in
contemplative admiration meditating, as I waited for my coolies, who sat
moodily under a dilapidated roadside awning, nonchalantly picking out
mouldy monkey-nuts from some coarse sweetmeat sold by a frowsy female.
Then upwards we toiled in the dark, the weird groans of my exhausted men
and the falling of the gravel beneath their sandalled feet alone
breaking the hollow's gloom. Uncanny is night travel in China.

"Who knows but that ghosts, those fierce-faced denizens of the hills,
may run against thee and bewitch thee," murmured one man to the others.
They stopped, and I stopped with them. And in the darkness, pegging on
alone at the mercy of these coolies, my own thoughts were not
unsynchronistic.

At last, with no slight misgiving, we came down into the city's smoke.
Dogs barked at me, and ran away like the curs they are. Midway down the
stone footway my yamen runner too cautiously crept up to me in the dark,
muttering something, and I floored him with my fist. Afterwards I
learnt that he came to relieve me of the pony I was leading.

Every room in every wretched inn was occupied; opium fumes already
issued from the doorways, and it was now pitch dark, so that I could
scarce see the sallow faces of the hungry, uncouth crowd, to whom with
no little irritation I tried to speak as I peered carefully into the
caravanserai. Evident it certainly was that the duty lying nearest to me
at that particular moment, to myself and all concerned therein, was to
accept what I was offered, and not wear out my temper in grumbling. My
boy, Lao Chang (an I-pien), the brick, expressed to me his regrets, and
something like real sympathy shone out from his eyes in the dimness.

"Puh p'a teh, puh p'a teh" ("Have no fear, have no fear"), said he; and
as I stood the while piling up cruellest torture upon my uncourtly host,
he made off to prepare a downstair room (to lapse into modern
boarding-house phraseology).

First through an outer apartment, dark as darkest night; on past the
caterwauling cook and a few disreputable culinary hangers-on