delicately covered, pleasing to one's aesthetic sense.
The center was a dome, all full of life and waving leafage, ethereal and
sweet; and running down, like children to their mother, were numerous
little hills densely clothed in a green lighter and more dainty than
that of the parent hill, throwing graceful curtsies to the murmuring
river at the foot. As I write here, bathed in the beauty of spring
sunlight, it is difficult to believe that a few hours since the
thermometer was at zero. Little spots of habitation, with foodstuffs
growing alongside, looking most lonely in their patches of green in the
forest, added a human and sentimental picturesqueness to a scene so
strongly impressive.

A thatched, barn-like place gave us rest, the woman producing for me a
huge chunk of palatable rice sponge-cake sprinkled with brown sugar.
Little naked children, offspring of parents themselves covered with
merest hanging rags, groped round me and treated me with courteous
curiosity; goats smelt round the coolie-loads of men who rested on low
forms and smoked their rank tobacco; smoke from the green wood fires
issued from the mud grates, where receptacles were filled with boiling
water ready for the traveler, constantly re-filled by a woman whose
child, hung over her back, moaned piteously for the milk its mother was
too busy to give to it. Near by a young girl gave suck to a deformed
infant, lucky to have survived its birth; her neck was as big as her
breasts--merely a case of goitre. Coolies passed, panting and puffing,
all casting a curious glance at him to whose beneficence all were
willing to pander.

At tiffin I counted thirty-three wretched people, who turned out to see
the barbarian. They desired, and desired importunately, to touch me and
the clothes which covered me. And I submitted.

This half-way place was interesting owing to the fact that the lady in
charge of the buffet could speak two words of French--she had, I
believe, acted as washerwoman to a man who at one time had been in the
Customs at Mengtsz. Great excitement ensued among the perspiring
laborers of the road and the dumb-struck yokels of the district. The
lady was so goitrous that it would have been extremely risky to hazard a
guess as to the exact spot where her face began or ended; and here, in a
place where with all her neighbors she had lived through a period noted
for famine, for rebellion, for wholesale death and murder of an entire
village, she endur