themselves the general custom is for a man to shave
his upper lip so long as his father is alive, so that in the ordinary
course a man wearing a moustache is looked upon as an old man. In
Tong-ch'uan-fu the rumor got abroad that three "uei kueh ren" ("foreign
men") went riding horses--(two young ones and one old one. The "old one"
was myself, because I had hair on my top lip, despite the fact that I
was considerably the junior. And the fact that one was a lady was not
deemed worthy of the slightest consideration.--E.J.D.]

CHAPTER XVI.

_Lu-feng-hsien and its bridge_. _Magnificence of mountains towards the
capital_. _Opportunity for Dublin Fusiliers_. _Characteristic climbing.
Crockery crash and its sequel_. _Mountain forest_. _Changeableness of
climate_. _Wayside scene and some reflections_. _Is your master drunk?
Babies of the poor_. _Loess roads_. _Travelers, and how they should
travel_. _Wrangling about payment at the tea-shop_. _The lying art among
the Chinese_. _Difference of the West and East_. _Strange Chinese
characteristic_. _Eastern and Western civilization, and how it is
working_. _Remarks on the written character and Romanisation_. _Will
China lose her national characteristics? "Ih dien mien, ih dien mien."_
_A nasty experience of the impotently dumb_. _Rescued in the nick of
time._

When the day shall come for its history to be told, the historian will
have little to say of Lu-feng-hsien, that is--if he is a decent sort of
fellow.

He may refer to its wonderful bridge, to its beggars and its ruins. The
stone bridge, one of the best of its kind in the whole empire, and I
should think better than any other in Yuen-nan, stands to-day
conspicuously emblematic of ill-departed prosperity. So far as I
remember, it was the only public ornament in a condition of passable
repair in any way creditable to the ratepayers of the hsien. The wall is
decayed, the people are decayed, and in every nook and cranny are
painful evidences of preventable decay, marked by a conservatism among
the inhabitants and unpardonable indolence.

The bridge, however, has stood the test of time, and bids fair to last
through eternity. Other travelers have passed over it since the days of
Marco Polo, but I should like to say a word about it. Twelve yards or so
wide, and no less than 150 yards long, it is built entirely of grey
stone; with its massive piers, its excellent masonry, its good
(although crude) carving, its old-time s