shment of bethrothal and
marriage laws, calculated to revolutionize the community and to
introduce what in China is the equivalent for home life.

Betrothal among the Chinese is a matter with which the parties most
deeply concerned have little to do. Their parents engage a go-between or
match-maker, and another point is that there is no age limit. Not so now
with the Christian Miao. No paid go-between is engaged, and brides are
to be at a minimum age of eighteen years, and bridegrooms twenty. The
establishment of these laws will, it is hoped, make for the emancipation
from a life of the most dreadful misery of thousands of women in one of
the darkest countries of the earth.[AF]

But now the Miao is pressing forward under his burdens, to guide himself
in the struggle, to retrieve his falls and his failures; and in the
future lies his hope--the indomitable hope upon which the interest of
humanity is based--and he has in addition the grand expectation of
escaping despair even in death. It is all the praiseworthy work of our
fellow-countrymen, living isolated lives among the people, building up a
worthy Christian structure upon Miao simplicity and humble fidelity to
the foreigner.

But I digress from my travel.

Little out of the ordinary marked my travels to Lao-ya-kwan (6,800
feet), an easy stage. My meager tiffin at an insignificant mountain
village was, as usual, an educational lesson to the natives. Each tin
that came from my food basket--one's servant delighted to lay out the
whole business--underwent the severest criticism tempered with unmeaning
eulogy, picked up and put down by perhaps a score of people, who did not
mean to be rude. When I used their chopsticks--dirty little pieces of
bamboo--in a manner very far removed from their natural method, they
were proud of me. Outrageously panegyric references were made when an
old man, scratching at his disagreeable itch-sores under my nose,
clipped a youngster's ear for hazarding my age to be less than that of
any of the bystanders, the length of my moustache and a three-day growth
on my chin giving them the opinion that I was certainly over sixty.[AG]

I entered Lao-ya-kwan under an inauspicious star. No accommodation was
to be had, all the inns were literally overrun with sedan chairs and
filled with well-dressed officials, already busy with the "hsi-lien"
(wash basin). In my dirty khaki clothes, out at knee and elbow, looking
musty and mean and dusty, with my to