one leg tied with a couple of strands of straw to the
cover, on which it crowed lustily. Their mission was an honorable one,
carrying the honored dead to its last bed of rest eternal; for this dead
man had secured the fulfillment of the highest in human destiny--to have
his bones buried near the scene of his youth, near his home. This is a
simple custom the Chinese cherish and reverence, of highest honor to the
dead and of no mean value to the living. To the dead, because buried
near the home of his fathers he would not be subject to those delusive
temptations in the future state of that confused and complex life; to
the living, because it gave work to a dozen men for several days, and
enabled them to have a good time at the expense of the departed. A
perpetual and excruciatingly unmusical chant, in keeping with the
occasion's sadness, rent the mountain air, interrupted only when the
bearers lowered the coffin and left the remains of the great dead on a
pair of trestles in the roadway, whilst they drank to his happiness
above and smoked tobacco which the relatives had given them. Once this
heaper-up of Chinese merit[AM] was dumped unceremoniously on the turf
while the headman entered into a blackguarding contest with one of the
fellows who was alleged to be constantly out of step with his brethren,
because he was a much smaller man. The gaffer gave him a bit of a
drubbing for his insolence.

Rain came on at Chennan-chou, a small town of about three hundred
houses, where I sought shelter in the last house of the street. The
householder, a shrivelled, goitrous humpback, received me kindly,
removed his pot of cabbage from the fire to brew tea for his uninvited
guest, and showed great gratitude (to such an extent that he nearly fell
into the fire as he moved to push the children forward towards me) when
I gave a few cash to three kiddies, who gaped open-mouthed at the
apparition thus found unexpectedly before their parent's hearth. More
came in, my beneficent attention being modestly directed towards them;
others followed, and still more, and more, whilst the man, removing from
his mouth his four-foot pipe, and wiping the mouthpiece with his soiled
coat-sleeve before offering it to me to smoke, smiled as I distributed
more cash.

"They are all mine," he said cutely.

Poor fellow! There must have been a dozen nippers there, and I sighed at
the thought of what some men come to as the last of half a string of
cash slipped t