; asked to
look out for a pony, which I could not see, but which I was told might
kick me; then onward to my boy, who stood on a stool and dropped the
grease of a huge red Chinese candle among his plaited hair, as he
wobbled it above his head to light the way. He gripped me tenderly, took
me to his bosom as it were, gave me one push, and I was there. He
tarried not. What right had he to listen to what I in secret would say
of the horrid keeper and his twice horrid shakedown inn? He passed out
swiftly into outer darkness, uttering a groan I rudely interpreted as,
"That or nothing, that or nothing."

It _was_ a room, that is in so far as four sides, a floor and a ceiling
comprise one. Of that I had no doubt. A sort of uncomely offshoot from
the main inn building, built on piles in the earth after the fashion of
the seashore houses of the Malay--but much dirtier and incomparably more
shaky. For many a long year, longer than mine horrid host would care to
recollect, this now unoccupied space had served admirably as the common
cooking-room--the ruined fireplace was still there; later, it had been
the stable--the ruined horse trough was still there. At one extreme
corner only could I stand upright; long sooty cobwebs graced the black
wood beams overhead, hanging as thick as icicles in a mountain valley;
each step I took in fear and trembling (the slightest move threatened to
collapse the whole dilapidation). Four planks, four inches wide at the
widest part and of varying lengths and thicknesses, placed on a pile of
loose firewood at the head and foot, comprised the bedstead on which I
tremulously sat down. Upon this improvised apology for a bed, under my
mosquito curtains (no traveler should be without them in Western China),
I washed my blistered feet on an ancient _Daily Telegraph_, whilst my
cook saw to my evening meal. His bringing in the rice tallied with my
laying the tablecloth in the same place where I had washed my feet--the
one available spot.

As I ate, rats came brazenly and picked up the grains of rice I dropped
in my inefficient handling of chopsticks, and in scaring off these
hardened, hungry vermin I accidentally upset tea over my bed, whilst at
the same moment a clod-hopping coolie came in with an elephant tread,
with the result that my European reading-lamp lost its balance from the
top of a tin of native sugar and started a conflagration, threatening to
make short work of me and my belongings--not to menti