da-like entrance, which when new
would have been a credit to any city. The stones of the main street were
so slippery that I could hardly keep on my legs. Frightened by one of
their number dragging its empty wooden carrying frame along the ground
behind it, a drove of unruly-pack-ponies lashed and bucked and tossed
themselves out of order, and an instant afterwards came helter-skelter
towards my ten-inch pathway by the side of the road. All of my men
caught the panic, and in their mad rush several were knocked down and
trampled upon by the torrent of frightened creatures. I thought I was
being charged by cavalry, but beyond a good deal of bruising I escaped
unhurt. Closer and closer came the hubbub and the din of the town--the
market was not yet over. As I approached the big street, throngs of
blue-cottoned yokels, quite out of hand, created a nerve-racking uproar,
as they thriftily drove their bargains. I shrugged my shoulders, gazed
long and earnestly at the motley mob, and putting on a bold front,
pushed through in a careless manner. Ponies with salt came in from the
other end of the town, and in their waddling the little brutes gave me
more knocks.

It was an awful crowd--Chinese, Minchia, Lolo, and other specimens of
hybridism unknown to me. Yet I suppose the majority of them may be
called happy. Certainly the simplicity of the life of the common people,
their freedom from fastidious tastes, which are only a fetter in our own
Western social life, their absolute independence of furniture in their
homes, their few wants and perhaps fewer necessities, when contrasted
with the demands of the Englishman, is to them a state of high
civilization. Here were farmers, mechanics, shopkeepers, and retired
people living a simple, unsophisticated life. All the strength of the
world and all its beauties, all true joy, everything that consoles, that
feeds hope, or throws a ray of light along our dark paths, everything
that enables us to discern across our poor lives a splendid goal and a
boundless future, comes to us from true simplicity. I do not say that we
get all this from the Chinese, but in many ways they can teach us how to
live in the _spirit of simplicity_. They were living from hand to mouth,
with seemingly no anxieties at all--and yet, too, they were living
without God, and with very little hope.

And here the foreigner re-appeared to disturb them. Even in Anning-cheo,
only a day from the capital, I was regarded as a b