pee botched and battered, I
presented a most unhappy contrast as I led my pony down the street under
the sarcastic stare of bystanding scrutineers. The nights were cold, and
in the private house where I stayed, mercifully overlooked by a trio of
protesting effigies with visages grotesque and gruesome, rats ran
fearlessly over the room's mud floor, and at night I buried my head in
my rugs to prevent total disappearance of my ears by nibbling. Not so my
men. They slept a few feet from me, three on one bench, two on another.
Bedding was not to be had, and so among the dirty straw they huddled
together as closely as possible to preserve what bodily heat they had.
Snow fell heavily. In the early morning sunlight on January 13th the
undulating valley, with its grand untrodden carpet of white, looked
magnificently beautiful as I picked out the road shown me by a poor
fellow whose ears had got frost-nipped.

No easy work was it climbing tediously up the narrow footway in a sharp
spur rising some 1,000 feet in a ribbed ascent, overlooking a fearful
drop. Over to the left I saw an unhappy little urchin, hardly a rag
covering his shivering, bleeding body, grovelling piteously in the
snow, while his blind and goitrous mother did her best at gathering
firewood with a hatchet. The pass leading over this range, through which
the white crystalline flakes were driven wildly in one's face, was a
half-moon of smooth rock actually worn away by the endless tramping of
myriads of pack-ponies, who then were plodding through ruts of steps
almost as high as their haunches.

A man with a diseased hip joined me thirty li farther on, dismounting
from his pile of earthly belongings which these men fix on the backs of
their ponies. It is a creditable trapeze act to effect a mount after
the pony is ready for the journey. He had, he said, met me before. He
knew that I was a missionary, and had heard me preach. He remembered my
wife and myself and children passing the night in the same inn in which
he stayed on one of his pilgrimages from his native town somewhere to
the east of the province. I had never seen him before! I had no wife; I
have never preached a sermon in my life. I should be pained ever again
to have to suffer his unmannerly presence anywhere.

Ponies were being loaded near my table. The rapscallion in question
explained that the black blocks were salt, taking a pinch from my
salt-cellar with his grimy fingers to add point to his remar