to offer. He commenced with a far-fetched eulogium of my
ambling palfrey Rusty, who limped along leisurely behind me. So far as
he could remember, poor ignorant ass, he had never seen a pony like it
in his extensive travels--probably from Yuen-nan-fu to Tali-fu, if so
far; but as a matter of fact, Rusty had wrenched his right fore fetlock
between a gully in the rocks the day before and was now going lame.
Dressed fairly respectably in the universal blue, my unsought companion
was of middle stature, strongly built, but so clumsily as to border
almost on deformity, and to give all his movements the ungainly
awkwardness of a left-handed, left-legged man. He walked with a limp,
was suffering (like myself) with sore feet; if not that, it was
something incomparably worse. Not for a moment throughout the day did he
leave my side, the only good point about him being that when we
drank--tea, of course--he vainly begged to be allowed to pay. In that he
was the shadow of some of my friends of younger days.

But of men enough.

From Ch'u-hsiong-fu on to Tali-fu the whole country bears lamentable
signs of gradual ruin and decay, a falling off from better times. The
former city is probably the most important point on the route, and is
mentioned as a likely point for the proposed Yuen-nan Railway.

The country has never recovered from the terrible effects of the great
Mohammendan Rebellion of 1857. Foundations of once imposing buildings
still stand out in fearful significance, and ruins everywhere over the
barren country tell plain tales all too sad of the good days gone.
Temples, originally fit for the largest city in the Empire, with
elaborate wood and stone carving and costly, weird images sculptured in
stone, with particularly fine specimens of those blood-curdling
Buddhistic hells and their presiding monsters, with miniature ornamental
pagodas and intricate archways, are all now unused; and when the people
need material for any new building (seldom erected now in this
district), the temple grounds are robbed still more. In the days of its
prosperity Yuen-nan must have been a fair land indeed, bright, smiling,
seductive; now it is the exact antithesis, and the people live sad,
flat, colorless existences.

For three days my caravan was preceded by twelve men, headed by a sort
of gaffer with a gong, carrying a corpse in a massive black coffin,
elaborate in red and blue silk drapings and with the inevitable white
cock presiding,