customs_. _Skilless building_. _Mythological, anthropological,
craniological and antediluvian disquisitions_. _At Yuen-nan-i_. _Flat
country_. _Thriftless humanity_. _To Hungay_. _A day of days_. _Traveler
in bitter cold unable to procure food_. _Fright in middle night_. _A
timely rescue_. _Murder of a bullock on my doorstep_. _Callous
disposition of fellow-travelers_. _Leaving the capital of an old-time
kingdom_. _Bad roads and good men_. _National virtue of unfailing
patience_. _Human consumption of diseased animals. Minchia at Hungay_.
_Major Davies and the Minchia_. _Author's differences of opinion.
Increasing popularity of the small foot._

But the storm came the next day, as we were on our way to Pu-peng,
during the ninety li when we passed the highest point on this journey.
By name The Eagle Nest Barrier (Ting-wu-kwan), this elevated pass, 8,600
feet above the level, reached after a gradual ascent between two
mountain ranges, was surmounted after a couple of hours' steep climbing,
where rain and snow had made the paths irritatingly slippery and the
task most laborious. Although the condition of the road was enough to
take all the wind out of one's sails, the sublimity of the scenery of
the dense woods which clothed the mountains, exquisitely pretty ravines,
tumbling waterfalls, running rivulets and sparkling brooks, with little
patches of snow hidden away in the maze of greens of every hue, all
rendered it a climb less tiring than the narrow pathways over which we
were then to travel. Half-way up we met a string of ponies, and I
underwent a few nervous moments until they had passed in the twenty-inch
road--a slight tilt, a slip, a splutter, probably a yell, and I should
have dropped 500 feet without a bump.

As we went along together, just before reaching this hill, we saw women
carrying bags of rice. They saw us, too. One passed me safely, but with
fear. The others carelessly dropping their burdens, scampered off,
afraid of their lives; and when one of my soldiers (whose sense of humor
was on a par with my own when as a boy I used to stick butterscotch
drops on the bald head of my Sunday School teacher, and bend pins for
small boys to sit on and rise from) shouted to them, they dived straight
as a die over the hedge into a submerged rice-field, and made a sorry
spectacle with their "lily" feet and pale blue trousers, covered with
the thin mud. In struggling to get away, one of them, the silly
creature, went