ed such terrible poverty that one would have thought
her spirit would have waned and the light of her youth burned out. But
no! The lusty dame was still sprightly. She had been three times
divorced. The person at present connected with her in the bonds of
wedded life--also goitrous and morally repulsive--stood by and gazed
down upon her like a proud bridegroom. He resented the levity of Shanks
and his companion, but, owing to the detail of a sightless eye, he could
not see all that transpired. However, we were all happy enough. Charges
were not excessive. My men had a good feed of rice and cabbage, with the
usual cabbage stump, two raw rice biscuits (which they threw into the
ashes to cook, and when cooked picked the dirt off with their long
finger-nails), and as much tea as they could drink--all for less than a
penny.

There is something in traveling in Yuen-nan, where the people away from
the cities exhibit such painful apathy as to whether dissolution of this
life comes to them soon or late, which breeds drowsiness. After a tramp
over mountains for five or six hours on end, one naturally needed rest.
To-day, as I sat after lunch and wrote up my journal, I nearly fell
asleep. As I watched the reflections of all these ill-clad figures on
the stony roadway, and dozed meanwhile, one rude fellow asked my man
whether I was drunk!

I was not left long to my reverie.

Entering into a conversation intended for the whole village to hear, my
bulky coolie sublet his contract for two tsien for the eighty li--we had
already done fifty. The man hired was a weak, thin, half-baked fellow,
whose body and soul seemed hardly to hang together. He was the first to
arrive. As soon as he got in; this same man took a needle from the
inside of his great straw hat and commenced ridding his pants of
somewhat outrageous perforations. Such is the Chinese coolie, although
in Yuen-nan he would be an exception. Late at night he offered to put a
shoe on my pony. I consented. He did the job, providing a new shoe and
tools and nails, for 110 cash--just about twopence.

I could not help, thinking of the children I had seen to-day, "Sad for
the dirt-begrimed babies that they were born." These children were all a
family of eternal Topsies--they merely grew, and few knew how. They are
rather dragged up than brought up, to live or die, as time might
appoint. Babies in Yuen-nan, for the great majority, are not coaxed, not
tossed up and down and petted, n